Measuring Computer Performance

Computer performance improvement embraces many issues, but is severely hampered by existing approaches that examine one or a few topics at a time. Each problem solved leads to another saturation point and serious problem. In the most frustrating cases, solving some problems exacerbates others and achieves no net performance gain. This paper discusses how to measure a large computational load globally, using as much architectural detail as needed. Besides the traditional goals of sequential and parallel system performance, these methods are useful for energy optimization.