Cost efficiency

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Cost efficiency (or cost optimality), in the context of parallel computer algorithms, refers to a measure of how effectively parallel computing can be used to solve a particular problem. A parallel algorithm is considered cost efficient if its asymptotic running time multiplied by the number of processing units involved in the computation is comparable to the running time of the best sequential algorithm.

For example, an algorithm that can be solved in O(n) time using the best known sequential algorithm and in a parallel computer with O(p) processors will be considered cost efficient.

[edit] References

• Advanced Computer Architectures: A Design Space Approach, D. Sima, T. Fountain and P. Kacsuk, Addison-Wesley, 1997.

	Topics in Parallel Computing	v • d • e
General High-performance computing Parallelism Data parallelism • Task parallelism Theory Speedup • Amdahl's law • Flynn's Taxonomy • Cost efficiency • Gustafson's Law • Karp-Flatt Metric Elements Process • Thread • Fiber • Parallel Random Access Machine Coordination Multiprocessing • Multithreading •Multitasking • Memory coherency • Cache coherency • Barrier • Synchronization • Distributed computing • Grid computing Programming Programming model • Implicit parallelism • Explicit parallelism Hardware Computer cluster • Beowulf • Symmetric multiprocessing • Non-Uniform Memory Access • Cache only memory architecture • Asymmetric multiprocessing • Simultaneous multithreading • Shared memory • Distributed memory • Massively parallel processing • Superscalar processing • Vector processing • Supercomputer Software Distributed shared memory • Application checkpointing APIs Pthreads • OpenMP • Message Passing Interface (MPI) Problems Embarrassingly parallel • Grand Challenge