A Synthetic Job for Measuring System Performance

A technique for measuring and comparing the performance of existing computer systems is to devise a synthetic job that is simple enough to be programmed with a modest effort in different languages and on dissimilar machines, so as to be run and timed on each of the systems. The job dercribed here is a greatly simplified file maintenance procedure, which exercises both the central processing unit and major input/output devices, with activity parameters being specified in a manner independent of the system. A complete PL/I version is shown as an example. It is conjectured that such a synthetic job may evolve into a practical standard of performance.