Measure of Efficiency on Heterogeneous Machines
Amy M. Levy, Raphael A. Finkel · 1997
Measuring machine performance within a network, especially with regard to parallelized applications, is an important issue. In this paper we examine the problem of computing the efficiency of distributed computations when executed on a heterogeneous mix of machines. We propose the calculation of {\em effective efficiency}, which is based upon the effective number of processors involved in the computation rather than the actual number of machines. Our experiments show that effective efficiency is a more realistic measurement of heterogeneous processors performance than traditional efficiency. Effective efficiency can be used to evaluate various cluster configurations with respect to a specific application or evaluate applications with respect to a fixed configuration.