Applicability of the software cost model COCOMO II to HPC projects. (2018) - Miller, Julian
The complexity of parallel computer architectures continuously increases with the pursuit of exaflop computing, which makes accurate development effort estimation and modelling more important than ever. While sophisticated cost models are widely used in traditional software engineering, they have rarely been investigated for the performance-oriented HPC domain. Therefore, we evaluate the fit and accuracy of the popular COCOMO II model to HPC setups. We lay out a general methodology to evaluate HPC projects with COCOMO II and analyse its cost parameters for the investigated parallelisation projects with OpenACC on NVIDIA GPUs. Further, we evaluate the accuracy of the model in comparison to the reported efforts of the projects and investigate the impact of inaccuracies in the cost parameter ratings by means of a global sensitivity analysis.