Amdahl's and Gustafson-Barsis laws revisited

2008/09/06 by Andrzej Karbowski, Karbowski, Andrzej
Business, Management and Accounting · #Advanced Queuing Theory Analysis #Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) #Distributed #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Parallel #Performance (cs.PF) #and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0809.1177

openalex publication_date 2008/09/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31

Abstract

The paper presents a simple derivation of the Gustafson-Barsis law from the Amdahl's law. In the computer literature these two laws describing the speedup limits of parallel applications are derived separately. It is shown, that treating the time of the execution of the sequential part of the application as a constant, in few lines the Gustafson-Barsis law can be obtained from the Amdahl's law and that the popular claim, that Gustafson-Barsis law overthrows Amdahl's law is a mistake.

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