SCMG Meeting Richmond
October 3, 2006

Location:

Agenda:

Speakers:

Robert Patterson
B.S. in Chemistry, Tulane University
Worked as research chemist, but got bored of laboratories
Shifted to Data Processing in 1969
• Programmer, State of Colorado
• Field Systems Engineer, Datagraphix and Bell & Howell
• Systems Analyst & Manager, Bank of America
• Systems Consultant (Capacity Planning), Bank of America

Linwood Merritt
Bank of America
Lin started his data processing career in 1970 as a Simulation Analyst and has been a US CMG member since 1984. He is the Project Manager of the "Enterprise Wide Capacity and Performance" project of SHARE, Regional Chair of Southern CMG, and Program Chair for CMG 2005.

Lin has published 16 CMG papers (plus one additional paper for UKCMG 2003) and presented at 28 SHARE conferences. He won the CMG97 Mullen award for the presentation "Performance Data from the Server to the Intranet: Getting the Data and Reporting It," and presented it at UKCMG in 1998. He is now working as a mainframe Capacity Planner at Bank of America in Richmond, Virginia.

Carol Petroski
Carol Petroski is a software engineer for BAE Systems in Arlington, VA. Carol has a BS in Mathematics and Computer Science from Drexel University. She also has a MS in Operations Research from George Washington University. Although Carol’s expertise is primarily in software engineering, she also has experience assessing computer performance using various techniques including Modeling and Simulation. Her presentation discusses work that she completed for a previous employer.

Abstracts:

Capturing Mid-Range Systems Data
Robert Patterson
Our company was paying large licensing fees for third-party products for gathering systems data for capacity planning and performance management. The focus of our effort was to save cost and at the same time obtain data for mid-range systems like Unix, Linux, and Windows servers. We wrote scripts to gather our own data using native commands.

This paper compares the various native commands and metrics capturing data in AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, and Linux, and presents an overview of the capture methodology. It also presents a high-level overview of how the data is used.

Windows data is captured in a similar manner, but is not covered in this session.

ARMing the Enterprise
John Yennie and Steve Sturtevant
Many large corporations and government agencies are modernizing their computer systems to use network and web-based technologies. These applications have many components and are interfaced to legacy systems as well as newer COTS packages. Response time measurements are a necessary part of the final system and ARM is a logical choice for obtaining those measurements. This session describes the ARM strategy pursued and results obtained by the e-Customs Partnership for the ACE project, a multi-billion dollar web-based customs modernization effort.

ARM Using Eclipse TPTP
Oliver Cole
The Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Project is releasing an open source, fully functional ARM 4.0 implementation in June 2006 (Eclipse TPTP version 4.2). This session will describe the TPTP project and explain how ARM has been implemented in TPTP. The tradeoffs involved in getting to this point will be discussed, along with the challenges in moving forward. Specific examples will show how to get started using ARM for your application with Eclipse TPTP.

"Mainframe MIPS" Open Discussion - New Observations Concerning the MP Effect
Led by Linwood Merritt
Recent mainframe benchmarks at a user site have unearthed a "MIPS rating" issue: the "MP Effect" (less capacity per CPU engine when there are more engines processing the work) is influenced by the number of CPU actually busy during the measured interval. This discussion will include the use of IBM's zPCR tool and published MIPS ratings. Join this discussion in the continuing saga of CPU normalization.

Case Study of Modeling Performance in a Politically Charged Environment
Carol Petroski, BAE Systems
Modeling performance can be extremely difficult, particularly when an outsider does the analysis. The modeling methodology and overall approach can make a significant difference to the success of such an effort. This session discusses a user experience creating a simple simulation model. This model led to the identification of a serious coding flaw in the application.