Key concepts for any procurement, system design, or system analysis are presented in my 2007 Scientific Computing article ( link ).
A common sense approach is to keep what works and improve on what doesn’t. In other words, measure the performance characteristics of your current system(s) and keep those characteristics that support your workloads and improve on any that might limit performance.
These measurements, in essence, define a system balance that is quantifiable and, with the right choice of benchmarks, provides some assurance that an existing computational workload will run well on a new computer. This concept is not new and has been used in the HPC world for quite a while. The HPC Challenge Web site (icl.cs.utk.edu/hpcc) generates Kiviat diagrams (similar to the radar plots in Excel) to compare systems based on their standard set of benchmarks. A well-balanced system looks symmetrical on these plots because they perform well on all tests.
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