Abstract
The process known as procurement is commonly used by academia, industry, and government to acquire the most suitable computer system for their particular working environments. The challenge is to purchase machines yielding the desired performance given certain constraints in funding. The guidelines used in the acquisition of equipment can vary from customer to customer. Similarly, the demonstration of machine performance by computer vendors may differ according to the market type and share they control. In this paper, we describe a project from a recent graduate course on Performance Evaluation within the Department of Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, concerning a simulation of the procurement process by studying the interactions between computer vendors and the scientific community (academia, industry, and government). The goals of this project were: (i) to define and interpret the scientific methods used by customers to acquire their equipment, (ii) to equate computational work with machine performance and make cost-effective purchases, (iii) to select appropriate hardware/software for customer's needs, (iv) to determine effective methods of performance presentation, and (v) to investigate the psychology of vendor-customer relations within a scientific computing environment.
- [1] BAILEY, D. H. Twelve ways to fool the masses when giving performance results on parallel computers. Supercomputing Review (August 1991), 54-55.Google Scholar
- [2] BERRY, M., CYBENKO, G., AND LARSON, J. Scientific benchmark characterizations. Parallel Computing 17 (1991), 1173-1194.Google Scholar
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Index Terms
Simulating procurement in the classroom
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