Matching Applications to Architectures

This chapter describes the matching of applications to architectures. Successful use of the methodology depends, in part, on involvement by management. Part of management's role is to ensure that the available engineering effort is focused on those issues on which the eventual decision is likely to hinge. Management must also clearly communicate its goals and priorities. The methodology is flexible in its ability to weight some evaluation criteria more heavily than others. The choice of weighting assignments is the specific formal mechanism by which management priorities enter the methodology. Technical staff implementing the methodology will require guidance on how these assignments are to be made. The methodology requires a systematic assessment of expected performance against a candidate set of applications and/or algorithms. One approach to performance measures that can make a dramatic impression on management is the ability to do the same job for substantially less cost. Parallel machines that are inefficient on small versions of a problem can be used very efficiently on large versions. The best situation is to actually vary both the problem size and the machine size to obtain hard data on the scaling factors along both dimensions.