Scalability

Recall that the basic idea with parallel computing is that the more processors that can be applied to a program, the shorter should be it’s execution time

• This idea ignores several critical points

  • The program may not have been written to take advantage of more parallelism
  • Because of overheads, more processors may result in worse performance
  • Other parts of the computer contribute to performance besides the processors

Nevertheless, bigger machines are seen to be better

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