Performance of synchronous parallel algorithms with regular structures

New methods are presented for bounding and approximating the mean execution time of partitioning algorithm, and these methods are compared to previous approaches. Distribution-driven and program-driven simulations show that two of the methods are usually accurate to within 10% and give good estimates even when certain independence assumptions are violated. Asymptotic approximations and upper bounds are derived for the average execution time of multiphase algorithms when there is no contention for processes in the parallel phase. In addition, the authors bound the average execution time under static and dynamic scheduling policies and determine the optimum number of parallel tasks to be created to minimize the execution time bounds with constant scheduling overhead