Karp–Flatt metric

The Karp–Flatt metric is a measure of parallelization of code in parallel processor systems. This metric exists in addition to Amdahl's law and Gustafson's law as an indication of the extent to which a particular computer code is parallelized. It was proposed by Alan H. Karp and Horace P. Flatt in 1990. The Karp–Flatt metric is a measure of parallelization of code in parallel processor systems. This metric exists in addition to Amdahl's law and Gustafson's law as an indication of the extent to which a particular computer code is parallelized. It was proposed by Alan H. Karp and Horace P. Flatt in 1990. Given a parallel computation exhibiting speedup ψ {displaystyle psi } on p {displaystyle p} processors, where p {displaystyle p} > 1, the experimentally determined serial fraction e {displaystyle e} is defined to be the Karp–Flatt Metric viz: The lower the value of e {displaystyle e} , the better the parallelization. There are many ways to measure the performance of a parallel algorithm running on a parallel processor. The Karp–Flatt metric defines a metric which reveals aspects of the performance that are not easily discerned from other metrics. A pseudo-'derivation' of sorts follows from Amdahl's Law, which can be written as: