Parallelism: crfor ancc or roar Eloina Pelaez Programme on Information and Communication Technologies Research Centre for Social Sciences University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, Scotland 1. The New Revolution The whole history of computing is a history of hype, of revolutions, of generations, of best and biggest, of performance and user-friendliness. Parallelism is the latest earth-shattering revolution . "Performance" is the term most often used to describe the advantages of parallelism: "parallelism is about performance" . Parallel computers can perform operations far faster than sequential computers because they are able to harness together the power of a large number of processors . But parallel computers are potentially far more interesting than that. 2. MIPS, MOPS and M/FLOPS At first sight, "performance" is a clear, unambiguous answer to the question of the importance of parallel computers. On the face of it, performance is a straightforward matter. It is how fast it processes, measured in MIPS (millions of instruction per second), MOPS (millions of operations per second) or M/FLOPS (millions of floating point operations per second). Translated into economic terms, performance gives us the notion of cost-effectiveness, normally measured in terms of MIPS per $1 or MOPS/$K . Yet, there is something
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Parallelism: performance or programming
Pelaez, E.
Follow ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society
, Volume 19 (4)
Association for Computing Machinery – Dec 1, 1989
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