Efficiency vs responsiveness in a multiple-services computer facility
David N. Freeman, Robert R. Pearson · 1968
When a general-purpose computer performs compute-limited applications, its performance—unit cost per computation—is the primary measure of its adequacy. When such a computer performs a wide variety of services—interactive computation, fast-turnaround batch jobs, prolonged I/O-limited jobs, and prolonged compute-limited jobs—its raw performance is only one of several important measures: capability to overlap I/O operations with computation, accessibility to users, and turnaround times appropriate to user needs, as well as unit cost per computation. The focus of our paper is on two measures: capability to overlap I/O operations with computation, and a wide range of turnaround times.