Programmer resources are scarce. You need to target these resources so that they have the most impact. How do you do this if you don’t know the performance characteristics of your application and the hardware you plan to run on? That is what this chapter means to address. By measuring the performance of your hardware and your application, you can determine where it’s most effective to spend your development time.
Note
We encourage you to follow along with the exercises for this chapter. The exercises can be found at https://github.com/EssentialsofParallel Computing/Chapter3.