Performance Considerations of Shared Virtual Memory Machines

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-1995

Publication Title

IEEE Transaction on Parallel and Distributed Systems

Abstract

Generalized speedup is defined as parallel speed over sequential speed. In this paper the generalized speedup and its relation with other existing performance metrics, such as traditional speedup, efficiency, scalability, etc., are carefully studied. In terms of the introduced asymptotic speed, we show that the difference between the generalized speedup and the traditional speedup lies in the definition of the efficiency of uniprocessor processing, which is a very important issue in shared virtual memory machines. A scientific application has been implemented on a KSR-1 parallel computer. Experimental and theoretical results show that the generalized speedup is distinct from the traditional speedup and provides a more reasonable measurement. In the study of different speedups, an interesting relation between fixed-time and memory-bounded speedup is revealed. Various causes of superlinear speedup are also presented.

Comments

This research was supported in part by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration under NASA contract NAS1-19480 and NAS1-1672.

Original Citation

Sun, X. and Zhu, J. (1995). Performance Considerations of Shared Virtual Memory Machines. IEEE Transaction on Parallel and Distributed Systems. 6(11), 1185-1194, doi: 10.1109/71.476190.

DOI

10.1109/71.476190

Volume

6

Issue

11

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