Newsgroups: comp.parallel,comp.parallel.pvm
From: nfotis@theseas.ntua.gr (Nick C. Fotis)
Subject: Distributed Proccessing - How to measure speedups?
Organization: National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Date: Wed, 20 Jul 1994 10:47:58 GMT
Message-ID: <Ct8JBz.KDJ@dcs.ed.ac.uk>



Greetings to all,

a professor here asked a very hard question (for me):

- How can / should I measure the efficient execution of programs in a
  heterogeneous network?

He cannot (AFAIK) use the Unix time(1) anymore (or something like that) to
get the real CPU time, and if we use PVM (or something like that), the
efficiency becomes a very nebulous target.

We don't know what to measure anymore - the CPU seconds spent in each CPU
are rather irrelevant, as we may have CPUs from 30 SPECfp to 300 SPECfp each
- and the network delays aren't the same on each machine.

We cannot isolate the network, since it's not our own, and the wall-clock
time is not adequate metric, since he does research on efficient parallel
algorithms (till now on homogeneous, shared memory machines)

We would appreciate advices, pointers to FTP-able reports, etc.
If we get anything interesting, I'll post a summary follow-up.

Thanks in advance,
Nick.
-- 
Nick (Nikolaos) Fotis         National Technical Univ. of Athens, Greece
HOME: 16 Esperidon St.,       InterNet : nfotis@theseas.ntua.gr
      Halandri, GR - 152 32   UUCP:    pythia!theseas!nfotis
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