
16 Accelerating MATLAB
®
Performance
1.7 Vertical versus Horizontal Scaling
Many of our programs start small and later grow to handle larger data sets, or expanded
functionality, using additional or improved hardware. The ability of a program to handle
such growth is called scalability.
31
Naturally, we wish all of our programs to scale well and
not to crash with increased workload (refer to the discussion of graceful degradation in the
preceding sections), nor demand a disproportionate investment in hardware.
We generally distinguish between two different types of scaling:
• Vertical scaling (also called scaling up) means that the application can ...