In parallel database systems, distribution of the data among the processors has a significant impact on the response time and throughput of the system. The benefits of parallelism (using multiple processors to execute a query) must be balanced against its costs (communication, startup, and termination overhead). We formalize the problem of minimizing overhead while partitioning data uniformly across the processors. We derive lower bounds on these combinatorial problems and demonstrate how processors may be optimally assigned so as to achieve these lower bounds for a number of problem classes. INFORMS Journal on Computing, ISSN 1091-9856, was published as ORSA Journal on Computing from 1989 to 1995 under ISSN 0899-1499.
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