Here is an article by Michael Feldman of HPCWire on Productivity of High Performance Computing.
“Despite the popularity of the Linpack benchmark, the majority of HPC users have already moved past a pure performance mentality. The most popular metrics being bandied about today are price-performance and performance-per-watt. But that still restricts our view of HPC investments to a relatively narrow aspect of system costs and benefits.
Over the past few years, there has been a lot of interest in looking at overall productivity as a way to manage and optimize computing investments. But that’s where it gets squishy. Productivity is an abstract concept. Whereas everyone can more or less agree on how many teraflops a given system is capable of, it’s much more difficult to measure how productive that system can be on a day-to-day basis. And to be useful, productivity has to incorporate all the facets of the HPC environment: humans, software and hardware. Devising a set of metrics to quantify those elements is the key.”
