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Amdahl's law

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Amdahl's law
"Overall system speed is governed by the slowest component." By Gene Amdahl, chief architect of IBM's first mainframe series and founder of Amdahl Corporation and other companies. Amdahl's law applied to networking. The slowest device in the network will determine the maximum speed of the network. See laws.
Amdahl's law [′am‚dälz ‚lȯ]
(computer science)
A law stating that the speed-up that can be achieved by distributing a computer program overpprocessors cannot exceed 1/{f+ [1 -f)/p]}, wherefis the fraction of the work of the program that must be done in serial mode.
(parallel)Amdahl's Law - (Named after Gene Amdahl) If F is the fraction of a calculation that is sequential, and (1-F) is the fraction that can be parallelised, then the maximum speedup that can be achieved by using P processors is 1/(F+(1-F)/P).

[Gene Amdahl, "Validity of the Single Processor Approach to Achieving Large-Scale Computing Capabilities", AFIPS Conference Proceedings, (30), pp. 483-485, 1967].
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Typically, the way around Amdahl's Law is to simply find embarrassingly parallel problems, but you can't escape the fact you're limited by the serial portion of your calculations.
Desktop multiprocessing: Not so fast by Network World Middle East
The additional microprocessor muscle has given most commercial applications only a partial boost, as predicted by Amdahl's law of balanced system performance.
The dumb disk is dead: viva the smart disk! by Freund, David / Computer Technology Review
 
 
 
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