International Conference on Advances in the Internet , Systems

Abstra t|Speedup is one of the main performan e hara teristi s of distributed appli ations. It is de ned as the ratio of appli ation's exe ution time on a single pro essor to the exe ution time, of the same workload, on a system omposed on N pro essors. This paper analyzes, in very general terms, the speedup that an be a hieved in distributed environments and shows why some appli ations s ale very well with the number of pro essors while others have stri t limitations on the speedup that an be a hieved in distributed environments. The existen e of su h limitations simply means that a straightforward distribution of a (sequential) workload is not a satisfa tory approa h, and new algorithms are needed to use distributed environments in a more satisfa tory way.