A novel scalability metric about iso-area of performance for parallel computing

Scalability is an important performance metric of parallel computing, but the traditional scalability metrics only try to reflect the scalability for parallel computing from one side, which makes it difficult to fully measure its overall performance. This paper studies scalability metrics intensively and completely. From lots of performance parameters of parallel computing, a group of key ones is chosen and normalized. Further the area of Kiviat graph is used to characterize the overall performance of parallel computing. Thereby a novel scalability metric about iso-area of performance for parallel computing is proposed and the relationship between the new metric and the traditional ones is analyzed. Finally the novel metric is applied to address the scalability of the matrix multiplication Cannon's algorithm under LogP model. The proposed metric is significant to improve parallel computing architecture and to tune parallel algorithm design.