Performance Considerations of Shared Virtual Memory Machines

Abstract

Generalized speedup is defined as parallel speed over sequential speed. In this paper the generalized speedup and its relation with other existing performance metrics, such as tra- ditional speedup, efficiency, scalability, etc., are carefully studied. In terms of the introduced asymptotic speed, we show that the difference between the generalized speedup and the traditional speedup lies in the definition of the efficiency of uniprocessor processing, which is a very important issue in shared virtual memory machines. A scientific application has been implemented on a KSR-1 parallel computer. Experimental and theoretical re- sults show that the generalized speedup is distinct from the tradi- tional speedup and provides a more reasonable measurement. In the study of different speedups, an interesting relation between fixed-time and memory-bounded speedup is revealed. Various causes of superlinear speedup are also presented.

Links

DOI: 10.1109/71.476190