So far, we have used the gettimeofday function to measure the amount of time it takes for programs to execute. In this section, we discuss how to measure how well a parallel program performs in comparison to a serial program as well as other topics related to measuring the performance of parallel programs.

We first cover some basics related to parallel performance:

While Amdahl’s Law and speedup are two very important concepts related to performance, having a good understanding of the following topics will round out a reader’s understanding of performance:

Specifically, the Gustafson-Barsis Law gives a better understanding of the limits of Amdahl’s Law.