Workshop Narrative: the Amdahl Executable

Last updated on 2026-02-20 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 12 minutes

Overview

Questions

  • What is the central example in an HPC Carpentry workshop?
  • What does the Amdahl program do?
  • Why do we need amdahl when there are lots of parallel applications out there?
  • How do I install the amdahl package?

Objectives

After this episode, Instructors will be able to…

  • Describe the story we tell to guide learners through an HPC Carpentry workshop.
  • Describe what the Amdahl executable does.
  • Install the Amdahl executable.
Key Points
  • HPC Carpentry workshops are centered on an exploration of Amdahl’s law of scaling, illustrating the diminishing gains of increasingly parallelisation.
  • Amdahl is a Python executable that runs for a specified amount of time but does nothing else.
  • amdahl is in the Python package index (pip install amdahl) as well as the EESSI virtual filesystem
  • amdahl depends on mpi4py and a working MPI installation!