ELXSI System 6400 .... Information needed

[Chris Thomson]

> > a 10 processor test at Sandia Labs they got 10.1X the power of a single
> > processor.  
> 
> This is an interesting trick. Does anyone have a clue about how they
> got a greater than linear speedup?

This was a cache effect.  The program being run was almost perfectly
parallelizable (how's that for a word?), with almost no synchronization
overhead (a linear algebra problem, I think).  Thus its total data motion
on 10 processors was very nearly the same as on 1 processor, but there was
10 times as much cache available, hence the 10.1 times speedup.  The result
is hardly a general one, but does speak well of the machine's overall
ability to multiprocess.
-- 
Chris Thomson, Myrias Research Corporation	   ihnp4!alberta!myrias!cmt
200 10328 81 Ave, Edmonton Alberta, Canada	   403 432 1616