Performance Evaluation, Prediction and Visualization of Parallel Systems

Presents a comprehensive and systematic discussion of theoretics, methods, techniques and tools for performance evaluation, prediction and visualization of parallel systems. Chapter 1 gives a short overview of performance degradation of parallel systems, and presents a general discussion on the importance of performance evaluation, prediction and visualization of parallel systems. Chapter 2 analyzes and defines several kinds of serial and parallel runtime, points out some of the weaknesses of parallel speedup metrics, and discusses how to improve and generalize them. Chapter 3 describes formal definitions of scalability, addresses the basic metrics affecting the scalability of parallel systems, discusses scalability of parallel systems from three aspects: parallel architecture, parallel algorithm and parallel algorithm-architecture combinations, and analyzes the relations of scalability and speedup. Chapter 4 discusses the methodology of performance measurement, describes the benchmark-oriented performance test and analysis and how to measure speedup and scalability in practice. The text should serve as a reference for researchers, and may be used as a text for advanced courses on the topic.