Development Effort Estimation in HPC

In order to cover the ever increasing demands for computational power, while meeting electrical power and budget constraints, HPC systems are continuing to increase in hardware and software complexity. As a direct consequence, this also leads to increased development efforts to parallelize, tune or port applications. For an informed decision on how to spend available budgets, we therefore need quantitative metrics to estimate the development effort in HPC. While development effort estimation is widely used in software engineering, applying it to HPC, with its strong focus on performance, is not straightforward. In this paper, we first review existing approaches of effort estimation for general computing and then derive a novel methodology to estimate development effort specifically targeted at HPC. Further, we propose a concept to identify factors impacting development effort and encapsulate it in an effort log tool to collect data on development time.