Commentary—Speedups and Insights

Abstract

It is a pleasure to be invited to participate in the discussion of this thoughtful paper, “Reporting Computational Experiments with Parallel Algorithms: Issues, Measures, and Experts' Opinions” by Richard S. Barr and Betty L. Hickman. As one who has published many a table of speedups, I feel very much in the authors' audience, perhaps even in their crosshairs. Their paper focuses attention on an issue faced by every reader as well as writer of articles that report the results of experiments with parallel programs running on real parallel machines. I believe the paper can contribute to more accurate communication in the parallel processing community through a heightened awareness of the issues surrounding reporting of experiments. The survey is a novel addition to the discussion, and seems to indicate that the field's participants are seriously grappling with this problem, although no consensus has developed. What I hope to contribute here are a few opinions on why there is still a quite legitimate variation in what results are reported and how they are measured and presented, as well as some experiences in my own research that might reinforce some of the conclusions in the paper. INFORMS Journal on Computing, ISSN 1091-9856, was published as ORSA Journal on Computing from 1989 to 1995 under ISSN 0899-1499.