%0 Conference Paper %B 18th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, 1998. Proceedings %D 1998 %T LBF: a performance metric for program reorganization %A Eom, H. %A Hollingsworth, Jeffrey K %K case study %K Computational modeling %K computer network %K Computer science %K Debugging %K distributed processing %K distributed program %K Educational institutions %K Integrated circuit testing %K LBF metric %K load balancing factor %K Load management %K measurement %K NIST %K parallel program %K parallel programming %K performance metric %K program reorganization %K program tuning %K Programming profession %K resource allocation %K software metrics %K software performance evaluation %K US Department of Energy %X We introduce a new performance metric, called Load Balancing Factor (LBF), to assist programmers with evaluating different tuning alternatives. The LBF metric differs from traditional performance metrics since it is intended to measure the performance implications of a specific tuning alternative rather than quantifying where time is spent in the current version of the program. A second unique aspect of the metric is that it provides guidance about moving work within a distributed or parallel program rather than reducing it. A variation of the LBF metric can also be used to predict the performance impact of changing the underlying network. The LBF metric can be computed incrementally and online during the execution of the program to be tuned. We also present a case study that shows that our metric can predict the actual performance gains accurately for a test suite of six programs %B 18th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, 1998. Proceedings %I IEEE %P 222 - 229 %8 1998/05/26/29 %@ 0-8186-8292-2 %G eng %R 10.1109/ICDCS.1998.679505