The Calculation of Equilibrium Concentrations. ESTIME: A Computer Program for Comparing Execution Times on Different Machines.

A computer program, ESTIME, has been written in several languages (FORTRAN, BASIC and Pascal), and in double and single precision versions. ESTIME uses the ES4EC algorithm for the computation of equilibrium concentrations, for a typical synthetic system of two metals, one ligand, the proton and 35 species. ESTIME is representative of computer programs that perform an analysis of equilibrium data in solution. In this study we report timing of calculations performed on different machines. Appendices 1 and 2 provide a listing of the FORTRAN version of ESTIME and one output example. Simple comparison parameters are proposed. We suggest that ESTIME will prove useful as a benchmark standard against which other programs may be compared. In this study we show that the relative performance of computer systems with ESTIME is comparable to the relative performance observed with other programs.