Toward a better parallel performance metric
Xian‐He Sun, John Leroy Gustafson · OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) · 1993
Due to programming difficulty, parallel algorithms are commonly compared with different levels of programming effort. They are also compared on different architectures. In this paper, the fairness'' of parallel performance metrics is studied. Theoretical and experimental results show that the most commonly used performance metric, parallel speedup, is unfair'', in that it favors slow processors and poorly coded programs. Two new performance metrics are introduced. The first one, sizeup, provides a fair'' performance measurement. The second one is a generalization of speedup -- the generalized speedup. The relation between sizeup, speedup, and generalized speedup are studied. A real application has been implemented on an nCUBE 2 multicomputer. The experimental results match the analytical results closely. 18 refs., 12 figs.