Intel 170 Servers manual Appendix A. CPW and CIW Descriptions, Commercial Processing Workload CPW

Appendix A. CPW and CIW Descriptions

"Due to road conditions and driving habits, your results may vary." "Every workload is different." These are two hallmark statements of measuring performance in two very different industries. They are both absolutely correct. For iSeries and AS/400 systems, IBM has provided a measure called CPW to represent the relative computing power of these systems in a commercial environment. The type of caveats listed above are always included because no prediction can be made that a specific workload will perform in the same way that the workload used to generate CPW information performs.

Over time, IBM analysts have identified two sets of characteristics the appear to represent a large number of environments on iSeries and AS/400 systems. Many applications tend to follow the same patterns as CPW - which stands for Commercial Processing Workload. These applications tend to have many jobs running brief transactions in an environment that is dominated by IBM system code performing database operations. Other applications tend to follow the same patterns as CIW - which stands for Compute Intensive Workload. These applications tend to have somewhat fewer jobs running transactions which spend a substantial amount of time in the application, itself. The term "Compute Intensive" does not mean that commercial processing is not done. It simply means that more CPU power is typically expended in each transaction because more work is done at the application level instead of at the IBM licensed internal code level.

A.1 Commercial Processing Workload - CPW

The CPW rating of a system is generated using measurements of a specific workload that is maintained internally within the iSeries Systems Performance group. CPW is designed to evaluate a computer system and associated software in the commercial environment. It is rigidly defined for function, performance metrics, and price/performance metrics. It is NOT representative of any specific environment, but it is generally applicable to the commercial computing environment.

yWhat CPW is

™Test of a range of data base applications, including simple and medium complexity updates, simple and medium complexity inquiries, realistic user interfaces, and a combination of interactive and batch activities.

™Test of commitment control

™Test of concurrent data access by large numbers of users running a single group of programs.

™Reasonable approximation of a steady-state, data base oriented commercial application.

yWhat CPW is not:

™An indication of the performance capabilities of a system for any specific customer situation

™A test of "ad-hoc" (query) data base performance

yWhen to use CPW data

™Approximate product positioning between different AS/400 models where the primary application is expected to be oriented to traditional commercial business uses (order entry, payroll, billing, etc.) using commitment control

IBM i 6.1 Performance Capabilities Reference - January/April/October 2008
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