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Amdahl's Law

Empirical Observation

A formula describing the theoretical limit on the speedup a task can gain from parallelizing part of it, showing that the portion of the task that must remain sequential eventually dominates and caps the overall speedup no matter how many processors are added.

Facts
Origin Year
1967 1
Core Principle
A formula limiting the speedup of a task as resources are added to the system executing that task. 1
Connections

In Field

Invented

Gene Amdahl, Pioneers

Gene Amdahl formulated Amdahl's Law in his 1967 paper on the limits of speedup from parallelizing a computation.

Sources
1. Amdahl's law, Wikipedia
  • Opening paragraph, sentence beginning 'It is named after computer scientist Gene Amdahl'
    (AFIPS) Spring Joint Computer Conference in 1967.
  • Opening paragraph, first sentence
    is a formula limiting the speedup of a task as resources are added to the system executing that task.
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