introduction -- speedup and efficiency

This course is part of the legacy of professor emiritus Floyd Hanson; see MCS 572 Introduction to Supercomputing, Spring 2003. Supercomputing is defined as the use of supercomputers and the goal of this course is the learn how to use supercomputers, which translates into parallel programming. The title of our textbook describes well our activities. Our first exercise is to visit top 500 supercomputing sites.

We stated Moore's law, defined flops, and related the clock speed with flops. We defined speedup, efficiency, and gave an example of superlinear speedup. We derived Amdahl's law, illustrated the law and finished by stating that this law is too pessimistic and also not realistic, promising to take scalability into account.

Bibliography