P3 Analysis

The goal of P3 analysis is to understand the interaction of application performance, application portability and developer productivity. Using quantitative metrics, developers can set objective goals and measure their progress towards those goals.

Terminology

The terminology used by the P3 Analysis Library was first introduced in “Implications of a Metric for Performance Portability”.

Problem

A task with a pass/fail metric for which quantitative performance may be measured.

Application

Software capable of solving a problem with measurable correctness and performance.

Platform

A collection of software and hardware on which an application may run a problem.

Application Efficiency

The performance of an application, measured relative to the best known performance previously demonstrated for solving the same problem on the same platform.

Architectural Efficiency

The performance of an application, measured relative to the theoretical peak performance of the platform (e.g. peak memory bandwidth).

Some of these definitions are flexible, allowing the same performance data to be used for multiple case studies with different interpretations of these terms. The library is designed with this flexibility in mind (see p3analysis.data.projection()); concrete definitions are not required when collecting data.