speedup
Pluralspeedups
- 1The amount or rate by which the time needed to do a given amount of work is reduced.
Switching to the new route gave our drivers a ten-minute speedup on every delivery.
Moving the files to a faster server produced a noticeable speedup in the nightly backup.
Similaracceleration, improvement
Oppositeslowdown
Note
The noun is the phrasal verb speed up closed into one word, and the spacing tells them apart: we need to speed up the backup, but the new server gave us a speedup. Its natural opposite, slowdown, is built the same way. Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave (1980) stretches it to a whole economy, a “generalized speedup of the corporate metabolism”.
- 2An employer's demand that workers produce more output without being paid more.
Hundreds of workers walked out to protest the latest speedup on the packing line.
Union leaders warned that the new quotas were just a speedup by another name.
Note
The word comes from the shop floor and union politics, where a speedup often meant running the line faster while pay stayed put; the strike that gave rise to the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement was over a line pushed from 49 to 58 cars an hour. Stretch-out is its close partner; the go-slow and work-to-rule are the workers' answers.
- 3In computing, the relationship between how long a task takes and the number of processors used to run it.
The simulation showed nearly linear speedup up to sixteen processors, then leveled off.
Parallel programs rarely reach ideal speedups, because some steps must still run one after another.
Note
Computer scientists usually give it as a ratio: a task's running time on one processor divided by its time on many. When that ratio grows in step with the number of processors, the speedup is called linear, or ideal. In practice the parts of a program that must run in sequence set a ceiling, so adding processors eventually stops paying off.
Practice
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Origin
A noun formed from the verb speed up.