Is Amdahl’s law a friend or foe of parallel processing?

What will be an ideal response?


Although Amdahl’s law allows you to estimate how much improvement parallelizing a problem will give you, some commentators have stated that it has throttled the development of parallel processing by saying that the level of improvement you can get is very much related to the fraction of the program that cannot be executed in parallel. Because Amdahl’s law says that the ultimate speedup is limited, some researchers have felt that there was no point in pursuing high levels of parallelism. Why spend a lot of effort chasing ever increasing levels of parallelism if it leads to a dead end? In that sense, Amdahl’s law has acted as a brake on progress. The more cheerful Gustafson’s law says that as problems grow (i.e., are scaled up) the number of operations that can be parallelized increases and the benefits of parallelization continue to grow. In other words, Gustafson is saying that the ratio of serial to parallel processing time is decreasing as program complexity increases.

Computer Science & Information Technology

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