Quantifying Productivity - Towards Development Effort Estimation in HPC
Authors: Sandra Wienke (RWTH Aachen University), Tim Cramer (RWTH Aachen University), Matthias S. Müller (RWTH Aachen University), Martin Schulz (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
Abstract: With increasing expenses for future HPC centers, the need
to look at their productivity, defined as amount of science
per total cost of ownership (TCO), grows. This includes
development costs which arise from development effort spent
to parallelize, tune or port an application to a certain architecture.
Development effort estimation is popular in software engineering,
but cannot be applied directly to (non-commercial) HPC
setups due to their particular target of performance. In
our work-in-progress, we illustrate a methodology to qualify
and quantify development effort parameters and hence how
to estimate development effort and productivity. Here, the
main challenge is to account for the numerous impact factors
on development effort. We show preliminary results for
two case studies: Questionnaires reveal development effort
parameters with high impact and statistical tests help us to
derive further details (here: comparing programming models).
Additionally, we provide an online survey to engage the HPC
community.
Poster: pdf
Two-page extended abstract: pdf
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