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Measuring the scalability of parallel computer systems

Published: 01 August 1989 Publication History
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  • 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.

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

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    New York, NY, United States

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    Published: 01 August 1989

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    • (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
    • (2009)ReferencesHigh‐Performance Heterogeneous Computing10.1002/9780470508206.refs(239-249)Online publication date: 10-Aug-2009
    • (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
    • (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
    • (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
    • (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
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