Exploring the metrics to assess parallelism

Metrics are measurements that can help us understand how a system is performing and to compare different improvement approaches.

Here are some metrics and formulas commonly used to evaluate parallelism in a system.

Degree of parallelism

Degree of parallelism (DOP) is a metric that indicates the number of operations being simultaneously executed by a computer. It is useful to describe the performance of parallel programs and multi-processor systems.

When computing the DOP, we can use the maximum number of operations that could be done simultaneously, measuring the ideal case scenario without bottlenecks or dependencies. Alternatively, we can use either the average number of operations or the number of simultaneous operations at a given point in time, reflecting the actual DOP achieved by a system. An approximation can be done by using profilers and performance analysis tools to measure the number of threads during a particular...