What is scalability?
@article{Hill1990WhatIS, title={What is scalability?}, author={Mark D. Hill}, journal={SIGARCH Comput. Archit. News}, year={1990}, volume={18}, pages={18-21}, url={https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:263884632} }
This paper first examines formal definitions of scalability, but fails to find a useful, rigorous definition of it, and concludes by challenging the technical community to either rigorously define scalability or stop using it to describe systems.
194 Citations
A framework for characterization and analysis of software system scalability
- 2007
Computer Science
A framework for precisely characterizing and analyzing the scalability of a software system is presented, which treats scalability as a multi-criteria optimization problem and captures the dependency relationships that underlie typical notions of scalability.
A framework for modelling and analysis of software systems scalability
- 2006
Computer Science
This research investigates commonly found definitions of scalability and attempts to capture its essence in a systematic framework to restore the usefulness of the term.
Extending the scalable coherent interface for large-scale shared-memory multiprocessors
- 1993
Computer Science, Engineering
This dissertation investigates ways to efficiently share frequently changing data among thousands of processors using Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI), and investigates two new cache-coherence protocols that employ trees of cache lines and have similar or lower latency than SCI.
Scalable, parallel computers: Alternatives, issues, and challenges
- 2007
Computer Science, Engineering
A taxonomy and evolutionary time line outlines the next decade of computer evolution, included distributed workstations, based on scalability and parallelism, and concludes that Workstations can be the best scalables.
The Searching Scalability of Peer-to-Peer System
- 2008
Computer Science, Engineering
The hybrid peer-to-peer model is proposed as an improvement in searching so that every query by peer should be able to be independent from the total number of peers, and make the system expandable without the addition of incoming or outgoing messages.
Token Coherence: decoupling performance and correctness
- 2003
Computer Science
TokenB, a specific Token Coherence performance protocol that allows a glueless multiprocessor to both exploit a low latency unordered interconnect and avoid indirection and can significantly outperform traditional snooping and directory protocols.
Experimental evaluation of horizontal and vertical scalability of cluster-based application servers for transactional workloads
- 2008
Computer Science
This evaluation work compares the scalability and other related performance metrics when an application server cluster is scaled horizontally, adding new servers, and when it is scaled vertically, adding cores into the servers.
Toward the design of large-scale shared-memory multiprocessors
- 1992
Computer Science, Engineering
This thesis addresses the scalability of shared-memory multiprocessors by presenting a practical treatment of scalability, and proceeding to focus on aspects of two critical areas of large-scale system design: interconnection networks and cache coherence mechanisms.
A quantitative performance evaluation of SCI memory hierarchies
- 1994
Computer Science, Engineering
A quantitative performance evaluation of an SCIconnected multiprocessor that assesses both the communication and cache coherence subsystems and no significant relationship between cache size and network dimensionality was found.
16 References
Speedup Versus Efficiency in Parallel Systems
- 1989
Computer Science
The tradeoff between speedup and efficiency that is inherent to a software system is investigated and it is shown that for any software system and any number of processors, the sum of the average processor utilization and the attained fraction of the maximum possible speedup must exceed one.
Synchronization algorithms for shared-memory multiprocessors
- 1990
Computer Science
A performance evaluation of the Symmetry multiprocessor system revealed that the synchronization mechanism did not perform well for highly contested locks, like those found in certain parallel…
On parallel searching (Extended Abstract)
- 1982
Computer Science
The complexity of seaching by comparisons a table of n elements on a synchronous, shared memory parallel computer with p processors is investigated and it is shown that it is possible to search in O(lg(n)/p) steps if more general operations are used.
Validity of the single processor approach to achieving large scale computing capabilities
- 1967
Computer Science, Engineering
For over a decade prophets have voiced the contention that the organization of a single computer has reached its limits and that truly significant advances can be made only by interconnection of a…
A Benchmark Parallel Sort for Shared Memory Multiprocessors
- 1988
Computer Science
The first parallel sort algorithm for shared memory MIMD (multiple-instruction-multiple-data-stream) multiprocessors that has a theoretical and measured speedup near linear is exhibited. It is based…
Measuring parallel processor performance
- 1990
Computer Science
A new metric that has some advantages over the others is introduced that is illustrated with data from the Linpack benchmark report and the winners of the Gordon Bell Award.
Relations between concurrent-write models of parallel computation
- 1984
Computer Science
By fixing the number of processors and parametrizing theNumber of shared memory cells, tight separation results between the models are obtained, thereby partially answering open questions of Vishkin [V].
Parallelism in random access machines
- 1978
Computer Science
A model of computation based on random access machines operating in parallel and sharing a common memory is presented and can accept in polynomial time exactly the sets accepted by nondeterministic exponential time bounded Turing machines.
Benchmarks for LAN performance evaluation
- 1988
Computer Science, Engineering
A technique for quickly benchmarking the performance of local area networks (LANs) is presented. Programs which model both intermittent and constant network activity are given.
The NYU Ultracomputer—Designing an MIMD Shared Memory Parallel Computer
- 1983
Computer Science, Engineering
We present the design for the NYU Ultracomputer, a shared-memory MIMD parallel machine composed of thousands of autonomous processing elements. This machine uses an enhanced message switching network…