Q&A for the exam

I received two questions.

Here are the questions and my answers:

  1. I had an home exam from Wednesday until Friday morning, which made me not be able to go to the group session or lecture this week. I know you were supposed to give some exam tips for the exam on monday. If you could, can you write them to me here?

No, unfortunately eksamenstips are for those that show up, so ask a fellow student.
However, the second half of the exams tips lecture WAS recorded, see the course web.
 

  1. In terms of Amdahls law, which you went through last week, you said that for a program with 25 % sequential part and 75 % parallel, the maximum achievable speedup would be 2. When I use the same formula for a program with 10 % sequential part, my result come out to be a maximum achievable speedup of 5. But, in the old kompendium, it states that for a 10 % sequential part would give a maximum speedup of 10. Which is correct and why? (Sorry for explaining it a bit clumsy).

Normally, I do not do individual coaching, I do answer general questions that I then post on the course web.
The short answer is: do the math using Amdahls Law.

How you got five, for 10% seqential, I do not know. When increasing the number of cores toward infinity the max speedup converges toward 10. Why because the parallel part converges toward zero, and so the parallel execution time converges to the 10% sequential part only - and thus a speedup of 100%/10% = 10.

Good luck!

-- Eric

 

Published May 26, 2024 9:14 AM - Last modified May 26, 2024 9:14 AM