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The Fundamental Laws of Parallelism

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Programming Many-Core Chips

Abstract

This chapter introduces the basic laws of parallelism that have influenced the research and practice of parallel computing during the past decades. We discuss Amdahl’s and Gustafson’s law as well as the equivalence of the two laws; we also analyze how Amdahl’s law can be applied to multi-core chips and what implications it can have on architecture and programming model research. Finally we present some of the more controversial rules and conjectures, such as the KILL rule and Gunther’s conjecture .

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References

  1. Amdahl G (1967) Validity of the Single Processor Approach to Achieving Large-Scale Computing Capabilities. American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS) Conference Proceedings 30:483-485

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  4. Gunther N J (2002) A New Interpretation of Amdahl’s Law and Geometric Scaling. http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/cs/pdf/0210/0210017v1.pdf. Accessed 11 January 2011

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Correspondence to András Vajda .

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Vajda, A. (2011). The Fundamental Laws of Parallelism. In: Programming Many-Core Chips. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9739-5_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9739-5_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-9738-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-9739-5

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