In the above, f represents the fraction of the code that cannot be parallelized. The remaining fraction, 1 – f, is parallelizable. Optimally, if the parallelized code scales linearly with the number of workers once parallelized, then the runtime reduces to (1-f)/N and hence
TN = [f + (1-f)/N]*T1
Speedup ratio, S, and parallel efficiency, E, may be used:
- to provide an estimate for how well a code sped up if it was parallelized. For example, if f = 0.1 the speedup bound above predicts a 10 fold speedup in the limit. On the other hand, a code that is 50% parallelizable will at best see a factor of 2 speedup. In the latter example, a potentional speedup of only a facotr of two may not be compelling to initiate a code parallelization effort — especially if it takes a fair amount of effort to parallelize the code.
- to generate a plot of time vs. workers to understand the behavior of the parallelized code.
- to see how the parallel efficiency tends toward the point of diminishing returns. With this information, you would be able to determine, for a fixed problem size, what is the optimal number of workers to use.
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