The Limits of Parallelism

Darryl Gove, October 31, 2008

We all know Amdahl's law. The way I tend to think of it is if you reduce the time spent in the hot region of code, the most benefit you can get is the total time that you initially spent there. However, the original setting for the “law” was parallelization - the runtime improvement depends on the proportion of the code that can be made to run in parallel.