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Performance
Gustafson's Law
Scaled speedup for growing problems.
The article
If
For a fixed time budget, a larger machine lets you solve a proportionally larger problem, so the serial fraction shrinks with scale and speedup grows near-linearly — the optimistic counterpart to Amdahl's fixed-workload pessimism.
Then
“Before justifying more cores, ask whether the problem size grows with the hardware. If the workload is fixed, reason with Amdahl; if it scales, Gustafson applies.”
Unless
Amdahl's Law — for a fixed-size workload, the serial fraction still hard-caps speedup
Source
John L. Gustafson, Reevaluating Amdahl's Law (Communications of the ACM, 1988).
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