Sit down, take a deep breath and relax. Let your mind wander for a bit. I’m going to talk about something that runs counter to one of the basic tenants of computer performance. Something you may believe to be true for ever and always. Last time I talked about how concurrent parts of a program are those that can be computed independently. I also explained how the parallel parts of a program are those concurrent parts that should be executed at the same time in a way to increase the speed of a program. As I discussed, the differentiator is overhead. It is now time to take the next step. By the end of this column, I hope to convince you that the following is sometimes true:
In a parallel computer, faster processors are not always better than slower processors.
This statement is kind of a trick…
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