Measuring Productivity on High Performance Computers

Abstract

In the high performance computing domain, the speed of execution of a program has typically been the primary performance metric. But productivity is also of concern to high performance computing developers. In this paper we will discuss the problems of defining and measuring productivity for these machines and we develop a model of productivity that includes both a performance component and a component that measures the development time of the program. We ran several experiments using students in high performance courses at several universities, and we report on those results with respect to our model of productivity.