Reporting Performance

Performance is about the time taken to complete a specified task:

• Execution time

  The elapsed time between starting a task and finishing it.

• Faster than

  For a specified task, machine A is faster than machine B if the execution time for A is smaller than B.

It is often tempting to use throughput as a performance measure:

• Throughput

  The rate of completion of tasks over an extended period

It is easy to use parallelism to improve throughput. Improving execution time is more challenging. (See Hennessy & Patterson page 18)