Comparative performance of COBOL programs on mini vs. large computer systems

Abstract

The comparative performance characteristics of COBOL programs in a small versus large computer systems are investigated. The vehicle consists of a set of synthetic benchmark COBOL programs, each measuring a particular aspects of COBOL programs; and in addition a large actual COBOL program. Measurement of the CPU execution time and the elapsed clock time for various COBOL computations, data manipulation, and input/output is made on both a large scale computer (IBM 370/158) and a minicomputer (Texas Instruments TI980). Results of a number of such experiments are presented and comparisons made between results gotten from the two systems.