Chapter 5. Analytical Modeling of Parallel Programs

A sequential algorithm is usually evaluated in terms of its execution time, expressed as a function of the size of its input. The execution time of a parallel algorithm depends not only on input size but also on the number of processing elements used, and their relative computation and interprocess communication speeds. Hence, a parallel algorithm cannot be evaluated in isolation from a parallel architecture without some loss in accuracy. A parallel system is the combination of an algorithm and the parallel architecture on which it is implemented. In this chapter, we study various metrics for evaluating the performance of parallel systems.

A number of measures of performance are intuitive. Perhaps ...

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