Overview
Gustafson's Law is often seen as a counterpoint to Amdahl's Law. It argues that Amdahl's Law is too pessimistic because it assumes a fixed problem size. In reality, users use more powerful computers to solve larger, more complex problems.
Key Insight
When the problem size scales with the number of processors, the 'serial' portion of the task often becomes a smaller percentage of the total work, allowing for near-linear speedups in large-scale systems.
Application
This law is the foundation for supercomputing and big data analytics, where the goal is to process massive datasets that would be impossible on a single machine.