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From: wangjw%usceast@usceast.cs.scarolina.edu (Jingwen Wang)
Newsgroups: comp.parallel
Subject: Re: Ease of programming versus efficiency
Message-ID: <13066@hubcap.clemson.edu>
Date: 12 Feb 91 03:26:33 GMT
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   The Ease of programming and debugging and efficiency have been the two
most critical issues of parallel processing. Both are important, we
are unwiiling to sacrafice either one. For some problems, such as
computational fluid dynamics, you can never have enough computing
power. Efficiency is particularly a difficult thing for massive 
parallelism. If you are using only a dozen of processors, you might
say that ease of programming is most important. So you would prefer
a speedup of 4 for easier programming than a speedup of 8 with a
difficult programming. However, if you are using a thousand processors
and you only receive a speedup of about 30, you would like to sacrifice
your ease of programming for better efficiency, provided your problem
really needs a substantial speedup (there are such problems that data
must be processed in limited time for the results to be meanningful).

   The importance of programming environment for parallel system is
better justified by a recent article in IEEE Computer, Dec. 1990.


Wang, Jingwen   wangjw@usceast.cs.scarolina.edu
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