Question

A team of computer science researchers develop a program for searching trees that can be run in parallel. When they use distributed computing techniques to run the program on six computers in parallel, they find a speedup of 3. In this case, what does a speedup of 3 indicate?

Answer 1

Answer:

The program completed in a third of the time with six computers versus one computer.

Explanation:

The speedup of a parallel solution is measured in the time it took to complete the task sequentially divided by the time it took to complete the task when done in parallel (or put succinctly, speedup = sequential/parallel).A speedup of 3 means that the program took three times as long on one computer, which is the same thing as saying it took a third of the time with all six computers working in parallel.