Compute-bound
A workload whose runtime is limited by how fast calculations can be performed. Adding workers to a compute-bound job generally makes it finish sooner.
This is the regime distribution helps most: the work is genuinely arithmetic, so adding workers adds throughput almost linearly until partitioning or scheduling overhead becomes the limit.
Performance & optimization
Related terms
- I/O-bound: A workload whose runtime is limited by reading and writing data rather than by calculation. Adding workers to an I/O-bound job adds waiting, not throughput.
- Profiling: Measuring where a program actually spends its time, before deciding what to optimize.
- Speedup: How many times faster a distributed run is than the same work on one worker. Ideal speedup equals worker count; real speedup falls short of it.