MPPs, Amdahl's law, and comparing computers

The author examines Amdahl's law in the context of parallel processing and provides some arguments as to what the applicability of this law really is. Amdahl's law establishes an upper bound on the available parallelism given the fraction of sequential code present in an application. In this paper, Amdahl's law is revisited to derive a formulation which allows one to carry out some quantitative analysis. The claim that MPPs (massively parallel processors) are special-purpose systems is also addressed.<
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