Intel Threading Building Blocks

Scaling and Speedup

The scalability of a program is a measure of how much speedup the program gets as you add more and more processor cores. Speedup is the ratio of the time it takes to run a program without parallelism versus the time it runs in parallel. A speedup of 2X indicates that the parallel program runs in half the time of the sequential program. An example would be a sequential program that takes 34 seconds to run on a one-processor machine and 17 seconds to run on a quad-core machine.

As a goal, we would expect that our program running on two processor cores should run faster than the program running on one processor core. Likewise, running on four processor cores should be faster than running on two cores.

We say that a program does not scale beyond a certain point when adding more processor cores no longer results in additional speedup. When this point is reached, it is common for performance to fall if we force additional processor cores to be used. This is because the overhead of distributing and synchronizing begins to dominate. Threading Building Blocks has some algorithm templates which use the notion of a grain size to help limit the splitting of data to a reasonable level to avoid this problem. Grain size will be introduced and explained in detail in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4.

As Thinking Parallel becomes intuitive, structuring problems to scale will become second nature.