J. GUSTAFSON
The Scaled-Sized Model: A Revision of Amdahl's Law
Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Supercomputing, May 1988.


Soon after the controversial paper on Amdahl's law appeared in CACM, Gustafson extended his parallel performance model to cover vector architectures as well. In the last section on Benchmarks, he proposes changing LINPACK to make it scalable, letting systems be ranked by their FLOPS rates on problem sizes that adjust to the amount of computing power available. Dongarra was persuaded by this argument and adopted it in his "Toward Peak Performance" listing, also known as LINPEAK and the basis of the Top 500 ranking system for supercomputers.

Dongarra did not, however, adopt Gustafson's idea of fixing the execution time as the basis for scaling, which led Gustafson to create the SLALOM application benchmark the following year.


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