Article

Free access

Measuring the scalability of parallel computer systems

Authors:

R. E. vanKootenAuthors Info & Claims

Supercomputing '89: Proceedings of the 1989 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing

Pages 832 - 841

https://doi.org/10.1145/76263.76358

Published: 01 August 1989 Publication History

Abstract

This paper discusses scalability and outlines a specific approach to measuring the scalability of parallel computer systems. The relationship between scalability and speedup is described. It is shown that a parallel system is scalable for a given algorithm if and only if its speedup is unbounded. A technique is proposed that can be used to help determine whether a candidate model is correct, that is, whether it adequately approximates the system's scalability. Experimental results illustrate this technique for both a poorly scalable and a very scalable system.

References

[1]

M. J. Quinn, Designing Eficient Algorithms for Parallel Computers, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1987.

Digital Library

[2]

P. P. Patton, Multiprocessors: Architecture and Applications, Computer June, (1985), 29-40.

Digital Library

[3]

S. A. Ward, The MuNet: A Multiprocessor Message-Passing System Architecture, Proc. Seventh Texas Conference on Computing Systems, Nov., 1978, 21-24.

[4]

W. D. Hillis, The Connection Machine, MIT Press, 1986.

Digital Library

[5]

A. M. Kobos, R. E. VanKooten and M. A. Walker, The Myrias Parallel Computer System, Myrias Research Corp., Edmonton, Alberta, 1986. Proceedings of the Colloquium on Numerical Aspects of Vector and Parallel Computers C.W.I. Amsterdam (1987).

[6]

C. Thomson and K. McPhee, Experience Scaling the Myrias System to Hundreds of Processors, Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Supercomputers, Vol.11, May 15-20, 1988, Boston, 1988, 125-129.

[7]

S. P. Kumar and S. M. Stern, A Scalability Analysis of the Butterfly Multiprocessor, Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Supercomputers Vol. II, May 15-20, (1988), 101-108.

[8]

S. R. Deshpande and R. M. Jenevein, Scalability of a Binary Tree on a Hypercube, Proc. IEEE 1986 fnternational Conference on Parallel Processing, 1986, 661-668.

[9]

Y. E. Ma and D. G. Shea, Downward Scalability of Parallel Architectures, Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Supercomputing Vol. II, May 15-20, (1988), 109-120.

[10]

D. F. Elliot and K. R. Rao, Fast Transforms: Algorithms, Analyses, Applications, Academic Press, New York, 1982.

Digital Library

[11]

R. A. Finkel, Large-grain Parallelism - Three Case Studies, in The Characteristics of Parallel Algorithms, L. H. Jamieson, D. B.Gannon and R. J. Douglas (ed.), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1987, 21-63.

[12]

C. D. Polychronopoulous and U. Banerjee, Processor Allocation for Horizontal and Vertical Parallelism and Related Speedup Bounds, IEEE Trans. on Computers Vol. C-36, No. 4, (1987), 410-420.

Digital Library

[13]

Z. Cvetanovic, The Effects of Problem Partitioning, Ailocation, and Granularity on the Performance of Multiple- Processor Systems, IEEE Trans. on Compzlters Vol. C-36, No. 4, (1987), 421-432.

Digital Library

[14]

J. L. Gustafson, Amdahl's Law Re-evaluated, Comm. of the ACM Sl, (1988) 130-133.

[15]

J. L. Gustafson, G. R. Montry and R. E. Benner, Development of Parallel Methods for a 1024-Processor Hypercube, SIAM J. on Sci. Stat. Computing Vol. 9, No. 4, July, (1988), 609-638.

Digital Library

[16]

R. Mehrotra and E. F. Gehringer, Superlinear Speedup Through Randomized Algorithms, Proceedings of the 1985 International Conference on Parallel Processing, 1985, 291-300.

[17]

T. S. Axelrod, Effects of Synchronization Barriers on Multiprocessor Performance, Parallel Computing Vol. 6, (1986), 129-140, North-Holland.

Digital Library

[18]

K. Binder and D. Stauffer, A Simple Introduction to Monte Carlo Simulation and Some Specialized Topics, Applications of the Monte Carlo Method in Statistical Physics, New York, 1984.

[19]

M. Beltrametti, K. Bobey and J. R. Zorbas, The Control Mechanism for the Myrias Parallel Computer System, Computer Architecture News Vol. 16, No. 4, (1988), 21-30.

Digital Library

Cited By

Sun NLin GQiu JRimba P(2020)Near real-time twitter spam detection with machine learning techniquesInternational Journal of Computers and Applications10.1080/1206212X.2020.1751387(1-11)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2020
https://doi.org/10.1080/1206212X.2020.1751387
Lin GSun NNepal SZhang JXiang YHassan H(2017)Statistical Twitter Spam Detection Demystified: Performance, Stability and ScalabilityIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2017.27105405(11142-11154)Online publication date: 2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2017.2710540
Xiong HZeng GZeng YWang WWu C(2014)A novel scalability metric about iso-area of performance for parallel computingThe Journal of Supercomputing10.1007/s11227-013-1057-x68:2(652-671)Online publication date: 1-May-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11227-013-1057-x
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Measuring the scalability of parallel computer systems
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Architectures
    1. Parallel architectures
2. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Performance

Recommendations

Scalability of Parallel Algorithm-Machine Combinations

Scalability has become an important consideration in parallel algorithm and machinedesigns. The word scalable, or scalability, has been widely and often used in the parallelprocessing community. However, there is no adequate, commonly accepted ...
Measuring the scalability of heterogeneous parallel systems
PPAM'05: Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics

A parallel algorithm cannot be evaluated apart from the architecture it is implemented on. So, we define a parallel system as the combination of a parallel algorithm and a parallel architecture. The paper is devoted to the extension of well-known ...
Scalability versus Execution Time in Scalable Systems

Parallel programming is elusive. The relative performance of different parallel implementations varies with machine architecture, system and problem size. How to compare different implementations over a wide range of machine architectures and problem ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

Supercomputing '89: Proceedings of the 1989 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing

August 1989

849 pages

ISBN:0897913418

DOI:10.1145/76263

Chairman:
F. Ron Bailey

Copyright © 1989 ACM.

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]

Sponsors

SIGARCH: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture
IEEE-CS: Computer Society

In-Cooperation

Los Alamos National Labs: Los Alamos National Labs
NASA: National Aeronatics and Space Administration
Argonne Natl Lab: Argonne National Lab

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 August 1989

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

SC '89

Sponsor:

SIGARCH
IEEE-CS

SC '89: International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis

November 12 - 17, 1989

Nevada, Reno, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,516 of 6,373 submissions, 24%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

11
Total Citations
View Citations
550
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)36
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4

Reflects downloads up to 06 Oct 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Sun NLin GQiu JRimba P(2020)Near real-time twitter spam detection with machine learning techniquesInternational Journal of Computers and Applications10.1080/1206212X.2020.1751387(1-11)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2020
https://doi.org/10.1080/1206212X.2020.1751387
Lin GSun NNepal SZhang JXiang YHassan H(2017)Statistical Twitter Spam Detection Demystified: Performance, Stability and ScalabilityIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2017.27105405(11142-11154)Online publication date: 2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2017.2710540
Xiong HZeng GZeng YWang WWu C(2014)A novel scalability metric about iso-area of performance for parallel computingThe Journal of Supercomputing10.1007/s11227-013-1057-x68:2(652-671)Online publication date: 1-May-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11227-013-1057-x
Lastovetsky ADongarra J(2009)ReferencesHigh‐Performance Heterogeneous Computing10.1002/9780470508206.refs(239-249)Online publication date: 10-Aug-2009
https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470508206.refs
Bosque JPerez L(2004)Theoretical scalability analysis for heterogeneous clustersIEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid, 2004. CCGrid 2004.10.1109/CCGrid.2004.1336579(285-292)Online publication date: 2004
https://doi.org/10.1109/CCGrid.2004.1336579
Chihoub A(2002)High Level Simulation & Modeling for Medical Applications - Ultrasound CaseMedical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention — MICCAI 200210.1007/3-540-45787-9_25(193-201)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2002
https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45787-9_25
Pastor LBosquwe Orero J(2001)An efficiency and scalability model for heterogeneous clustersProceedings 2001 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing10.1109/CLUSTR.2001.960009(427-434)Online publication date: 2001
https://doi.org/10.1109/CLUSTR.2001.960009
Min Wang Weiqun Ding Hong Lin (1997)E-differentiation for analyzing scalability of parallel algorithms on parallel architecturesProceedings of ICICS, 1997 International Conference on Information, Communications and Signal Processing. Theme: Trends in Information Systems Engineering and Wireless Multimedia Communications (Cat. No.97TH8237)10.1109/ICICS.1997.652233(1457-1461)Online publication date: 1997
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICICS.1997.652233
Gupta AKumar VSameh A(1995)Performance and Scalability of Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient Methods on Parallel ComputersIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/71.3823156:5(455-469)Online publication date: 1-May-1995
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/71.382315
Gupta AKumar V(1993)The Scalability of FFT on Parallel ComputersIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/71.2386264:8(922-932)Online publication date: 1-Aug-1993
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/71.238626
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents