For the most part, I think it is fair to say "number of cores * time elapsed".

There exist a few caveats to that:

1) If you have a mixture of CPU speeds, you should probably normalize based 
upon the speed of CPU's.
2) If you have a lot of cores, each core has a bit less "oomph" than the 
previous one.    That is, 72 CPU's ine one 15k domain is less powerful than 18 
V440's.
3) Different platforms have hugely different costs.  A 1 board 15k domain costs 
a lot more than a V440.  Adjust your cost accordingly.
4) Not all applications are CPU bound.  You may find that some run out of 
memory much sooner than they run out of CPU.  In particular, I find myself 
buying more CPU's for J2EE servers so that I have more memory controllers.

A lot depends on what you want to charge for.  Are you charging based upon how 
much CPU time is used or how much benefit the consumer gets?  If you are 
charging based upon benefit, you may want to beg Sun for the m-values for the 
systems you care about.  Then, you could charge based upon the percent 
utilization (vmstat %usr + %sys in the simplest case) times the m-value of the 
system times the cost per "mvalue second" that is appropriate for the system.
This message posted from opensolaris.org
_______________________________________________
opensolaris-code mailing list
[email protected]
https://opensolaris.org:444/mailman/listinfo/opensolaris-code

Reply via email to