[BANANA] Berkeley Lab - Scientific Computing Seminar, June 16, 2006

[Parry Husbands]

Date:	Friday, June 16, 2006	
Time:	1:00pm-2:00pm	
Location: Building 50A-5132	

Seminar Speaker: Erich Strohmaier
                  Future Technologies Group
                  CRD, LBNL 	

Title: Performance Complexity: An Execution Time Metric to Characterize
        Performance Transparency and Programming Complexity 	

Abstract: 	

Performance evaluation of code execution focuses on determining performance
and efficiency levels for specific application scenarios. However, there is
no measure characterizing how complex it is to achieve performance and how
transparent performance results are. In this talk we present an execution
time metric called Performance Complexity (PC) to capture these important
aspects of code development. PC is based on performance results from a set
of benchmark experiments and related performance models reflecting the  
behavior
of a programmer. Residual modeling errors are used to derive PC as measure  
for
how transparent program performance is and how complex the performance  
appears
to the programmer. PC is independent from performance (P) itself which
allows plotting system behavior in a performance-complexity map (P-C Map).
We present a detailed description for calculating compatible P and PC
values and use results from the parametric benchmark APEX-Map to illustrate
the utility of PC for analyzing systems and programming paradigms.

Sponsor of Seminar: Kathy Yelick