Abstract
The talk starts with the observation that there often is a huge discrepancy between the claimed peak performance of a system and the actual performance experienced by the average user of that system running his/her program. The two figures can be two orders of magnitude apart for classic vector-oriented multi-processors, and the chances for that happening are even higher for parallel machines of all types. So a user buying a computer that is announced at 10 GFLOPS peak performance may end up having a meek 100 MFLOPS, as observed by his specific applications. This is particularly embarrassing since to get 100 MFLOPS one does not need a supercomputer; two workstations for $ 40K in total will do. Now this holds for the well-understood domain of vector processors; what should anyone expect from a machine with 256K processors, for which the vendor claims, say, 20 GFLOPS?
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© 1991 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Reuter, A. (1991). Parallel Computers: Toys or Tools?. In: Meuer, H.W. (eds) Supercomputer ’91. Informatik-Fachberichte, vol 278. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-76742-5_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-76742-5_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-54231-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-76742-5
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