Commentary - Parallel Reporting Guidelines Are on Target

The prevalent theme of Barr and Hickman's article is the multitude of methods for reporting parallel speedup and the difficulty in interpreting results of reported speedup. In fact, the general supercomputing community is plagued by too many terms and phrases for comparing runtime, efficiency, speedup, etc. The authors of the article are very much on target with their observations, as can be demonstrated by a discussion of another metric that is commonly used for comparison of machine performance. INFORMS Journal on Computing, ISSN 1091-9856, was published as ORSA Journal on Computing from 1989 to 1995 under ISSN 0899-1499.