Scaling: Why Worry?
Fixed problem size is limited
Too small a problem:
- May be appropriate for small machine
- Parallelism overheads begin to dominate benefits for larger machines
- Load imbalance
- Communication to computation ratio
- May even achieve slowdowns
- Doesn’t reflect real usage, and inappropriate for large machines
- Can exaggerate benefits of architectural improvements, especially when measured as percentage improvement in performance
Too large a problem
- Difficult to measure improvement (next)