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Comment by osti

5 hours ago

So is it a class of problems that can be parallelized well?

no (in both directions). lots of np/exp problems paralize well and you can be in NC and parallelize really inefficiently (e.g. you can get a 10x speedup, but you need 1000000x the hardware). the better framing is that NC is the class of efficient algorithms that can be sped up near arbitrarily by parallelization

  • Hmm your last sentence seems to exactly agree that it's a class of algos that parallelize well? What does sped up arbitrarily mean? It's still polynomial speed up right?

    • It's a difference of degree. People expect something that "parallelizes well" to show near 1-to-1 speedup. Double the hardware, double the speed. This is "you can always speed it up, but the hardware requirements can increase at any polynomial rate".

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