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Not sure if this is the right exchange for this question. But you could definitely answer it. Note professor said this was “wrong” on their quiz.

Question: Identify a daily activity that can be speed up with parallelization.

My answer: People driving their own car vs people taking a bus. My reasoning: When people all take a bus they have to wait for all the destinations before theirs to pass. When people drive a car they go directly to their destination.

The professor said this isn’t a good example of a serial processor made parallel. I’m not convinced. Where am I wrong? I plan to argue my case..

visc
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  • I plan to argue my case be sure to have speed up, parallelization, speed defined in no uncertain terms. There is time to completion, completion rate, …. – greybeard Sep 23 '20 at 07:01
  • I'm not sure if it's a bad example but I also don't think it's a good example. If the bus went to everyone's house it might work, but buses usually go in straight-ish lines, they don't zigzag all over the place. – user253751 Sep 23 '20 at 15:57

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If I want to go from A to B, that doesn’t get faster by taking a bus. But if I want to take 50 people from A to B that actually will be done much faster.

A simple example: How do you make six boiled eggs? And how do you make 120 boiled eggs if you have an oven with four flames, that will involve some pipelining as well.

gnasher729
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  • Flip it... If people took their own cars from A to ? then that's much faster then everyone taking the same bus from A to ? – visc Sep 23 '20 at 18:45
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So I suppose in ur example the bus and the cars are the processors and the people going to work are the tasks the processors have to compute. I suppose the problem with your example is that the bus itself is already a parallel processors in the sense that it is capable of doing the same computation step for multiple tasks at the same time (e.g. it can load or unload multiple people at the same stop).

So your example is simply modifying an existing parallel processor into another parallel processor and is therefore not what your professors was expecting.

Pepsilon7
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