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Phenomenon in parallel computing

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Parallel slowdown is a phenomenon in parallel computing where parallelization of a parallel algorithm beyond a certain point causes the program to run slower (take more time to run to completion).

Parallel slowdown is typically the result of a communications bottleneck. As more processor nodes are added, each processing node spends progressively more time doing communication than useful processing. At some point, the communications overhead created by adding another processing node surpasses the increased processing power that node provides, and parallel slowdown occurs.

Parallel slowdown occurs when the algorithm requires significant communication, particularly of intermediate results. Some problems, known as embarrassingly parallel problems, do not require such communication, and thus are not affected by slowdown.

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v t e Parallel computing
General	Distributed computing Parallel computing Massively parallel Cloud computing High-performance computing Multiprocessing Manycore processor GPGPU Computer network Systolic array
Levels	Bit Instruction Thread Task Data Memory Loop Pipeline
Multithreading	Temporal Simultaneous (SMT) Simultaneous and heterogenous Speculative (SpMT) Preemptive Cooperative Clustered multi-thread (CMT) Hardware scout
Theory	PRAM model PEM model Analysis of parallel algorithms Amdahl's law Gustafson's law Cost efficiency Karp–Flatt metric Slowdown Speedup
Elements	Process Thread Fiber Instruction window Array
Coordination	Multiprocessing Memory coherence Cache coherence Cache invalidation Barrier Synchronization Application checkpointing
Programming	Stream processing Dataflow programming Models Implicit parallelism Explicit parallelism Concurrency Non-blocking algorithm
Hardware	Flynn's taxonomy SISD SIMD Array processing (SIMT) Pipelined processing Associative processing MISD MIMD Dataflow architecture Pipelined processor Superscalar processor Vector processor Multiprocessor symmetric asymmetric Memory shared distributed distributed shared UMA NUMA COMA Massively parallel computer Computer cluster Beowulf cluster Grid computer Hardware acceleration
APIs	Ateji PX Boost Chapel HPX Charm++ Cilk Coarray Fortran CUDA Dryad C++ AMP Global Arrays GPUOpen MPI OpenMP OpenCL OpenHMPP OpenACC Parallel Extensions PVM pthreads RaftLib ROCm UPC TBB ZPL
Problems	Automatic parallelization Deadlock Deterministic algorithm Embarrassingly parallel Parallel slowdown Race condition Software lockout Scalability Starvation
Category: Parallel computing

References

Kukanov, Alexey (2008-03-04). "Why a simple test can get parallel slowdown". Retrieved 2015-02-15.

References

See also