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The Value of Variance

Published: 12 March 2016 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    Measurements for distributed algorithms, such as performance results, are usually reported using averages, similarly to prevailing practice in other areas of computer science. We argue that including standard deviations offers additional information and that the minimal burden of providing standard deviations is outweighed by the benefits. We propose a new way of reporting run time speedup that incorporates standard deviation and demonstrate its usefulness in terms of two distributed graph algorithms.

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    Cited By

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    • (2021)Methodological Principles for Reproducible Performance Evaluation in Cloud ComputingIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2019.292790847:8(1528-1543)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2021
    • (2017)SLAs for Industrial IoT: Mind the Gap2017 5th International Conference on Future Internet of Things and Cloud Workshops (FiCloudW)10.1109/FiCloudW.2017.70(75-78)Online publication date: Aug-2017
    • (2017)Improving Performance of Distributed Graph Traversals via Application-Aware Plug-In Work SchedulerEuro-Par 2016: Parallel Processing Workshops10.1007/978-3-319-58943-5_44(545-556)Online publication date: 28-May-2017
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ICPE '16: Proceedings of the 7th ACM/SPEC on International Conference on Performance Engineering
    March 2016
    346 pages
    ISBN:9781450340809
    DOI:10.1145/2851553
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 12 March 2016

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    Author Tags

    1. distributed algorithms
    2. performance metric
    3. speedup
    4. standard deviation
    5. statistical measurement

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    • Research-article

    Funding Sources

    • Lilly Endowment Inc.
    • NSF

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    ICPE'16

    Acceptance Rates

    ICPE '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 23 of 74 submissions, 31%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 252 of 851 submissions, 30%

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    View all
    • (2021)Methodological Principles for Reproducible Performance Evaluation in Cloud ComputingIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2019.292790847:8(1528-1543)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2021
    • (2017)SLAs for Industrial IoT: Mind the Gap2017 5th International Conference on Future Internet of Things and Cloud Workshops (FiCloudW)10.1109/FiCloudW.2017.70(75-78)Online publication date: Aug-2017
    • (2017)Improving Performance of Distributed Graph Traversals via Application-Aware Plug-In Work SchedulerEuro-Par 2016: Parallel Processing Workshops10.1007/978-3-319-58943-5_44(545-556)Online publication date: 28-May-2017
    • (2016)Developer targeted analytics: supporting software development decisions with runtime informationProceedings of the 31st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/2970276.2975939(892-895)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2016

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