Data and computer communications (2nd ed.)
Data and computer communications (2nd ed.)
Computer networks
Multiprocessor performance
Performance of the Firefly RPC
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
Implementing remote procedure calls
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
Anonymous Remote Computing: A Paradigm for Parallel Programming on Interconnected Workstations
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Banyan: A Language for Scalable Parallel Programming on Loosely Coupled Distributed Systems
HPC-ASIA '97 Proceedings of the High-Performance Computing on the Information Superhighway, HPC-Asia '97
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The performance of parallel computing in a network of Apollo workstations where the processes use the remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism for communication is addressed. The speedup in such systems cannot be accurately estimated without taking into account the relatively large communication overheads. Moreover, it decreases by increasing parallelism when the latter exceeds some certain limit. To estimate the speedup and determine the optimum degree of parallelism, the author characterizes the parallelization and the communication overheads in the system considered. Then, parallel applications are modeled and their execution times are expressed for the general case of nonidentical tasks and workstations. The general case study allows the structural constraints of the applications to be taken into account by permitting their partitioning into heterogeneous tasks. A simple expression of the optimum degree of parallelism is obtained for identical tasks where the inherent constraints are neglected. The fact that the theoretical maximum speedup is bounded by half of the optimum degree of parallelism shows the importance of this measure.