The Science of Computer Benchmarking

This introduction contains material concerned with the definition of performance parameters and metrics with which to measure performance and units, with which to express them. It also presents new ideas resulting from the application of dimensional analysis to computer benchmarking.

Roger W. Hockney is Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at Reading University, England, where he was Professor of Computer Science between 1970 and 1985. He is now working as a freelance consultant in parallel computing and is Visiting Professor in the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University, England.

Between 1992 and 1994 he was the first chairman of the Parkbench Committee and was primarily responsible for the production of the committee's first report, published in 1994. The ongoing objective of the Parkbench Committee is to create a set of computer benchmarks for assessing the performance of the new generation of parallel computers, particularly distributed-memory designs that are scalable to a large number of processors, known as massively parallel processors (MPPs) or scalable parallel processors (SPPs).

Professor Hockney is currently writing and testing large 3D electromagnetic particle-in-cell codes for the simulation of microwave devices on large parallel MPP computers.