Suppose a program must execute 1012 instructions in order to solve a particular problem. Suppose further that a single processor system can solve the problem in 106 seconds (about 11.6 days). So, on average, the single processor system executes 106 or a million instructions per second. Now suppose that the program has been parallelized for execution on a distributed-memory system.
Suppose also that if the parallel program uses p processors, each processor will execute 1012=p instructions and each processor must send 109.p