Abstract

Program environments are now commonly used for parallelism on networks of workstations. There is a need for simple and consistent tools to measure algorithm performance on heterogeneous networks. In this work we propose a generalization to heterogeneous networks of the classical efficiency formula E(N) = S(N)=N , where S(N) is the speedup on N processors. keywords parallelism, performance evaluation, speedup, efficiency, heterogeneous networks 1 1 Introduction Today's scientific problems need more and more computing power. The present trend in supercomputer architecture development is to design parallel machines with powerful processors of more than 1Gflops. Workstation networks belong to this class of supercomputers. Environments like CHARM [18], Parform [7], P4 [6], PVM [11, 14], appeared allowing users to consider their computer networks as a virtual parallel machine. Most people have access to networks of computers. Furthermore, their total power has apparently no limit and s...

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