Estimating PETSc performance using SuperPI's results

[Ben Tay]

Hi,

I'm thinking of ways to estimate and compare the performance of PETSc on 
different CPUs. I think it will also enable one to make the wise choice 
of whether to upgrade or not.

Of cos, the best way is to run your own code on the new machine to see 
how much increase there is. However, most of the time this option is not 
available. I have found many forums whereby users post the time required 
to run programs such as SuperPI or other benchmarking softwares. I 
wonder if such software can be used to estimate the performance of PETSc 
too? In other words, if cpu A ran 4 times faster than on cpu B running 
SuperPi, is it safe to assume that it 'll be roughly the same running 
PETSc? Btw, SuperPi is a single threaded program.

Thanks