Amdahl's Law: Graphing the Pain
Table of Contents
This is an individual assignment. You may talk about ideas with others in the class, and if this is a programming assignment you may help each other debug code, but the code you type or the analysis that you write should be your own. Any ideas that you get from online should be limited in scope, and you should credit them appropriately via program comments.
Use a graphing program such as Excel, LibreOffice, R, or whatever you prefer so long as it looks good, to plot the following implications of Amdahl's Law.
Your Tasks
- Consider the speedup \((T_1/T_P)\) where \(P=256\) of a program with sequential portion \(S\) where the portion \(1-S\) enjoys perfect linear speedup. Plot the speedup as \(S\) ranges from 0.01 (1% sequential) to 0.25 (25% sequential).
- Consider again the speedup of a program with sequential portion \(S\) where the portion \(1-S\) enjoys perfect linear speedup. This time, hold \(S\) constant and vary the number of processors \(P\) from 2 to 32. On the same graph, show three curves, one each for \(S=0.01\), \(S=0.1\), and \(S=0.25\).
Turn in the graphs and tables with the data via Moodle. Ensure that the portion showing your actual results is included as a PDF or HTML file; that way, the grader can look without having to work through the complexities of a variety of different graphing programs. Please make sure your submission is anonymous.