You might have noticed that when you do a transaction in a bank, you usually see a single line being served by 2 or more tellers. You must have perceived that this technique of lining up customers is better than when each teller has its own line. This will lessen the chance of you being stuck for a long time when the guy before you takes a long time to complete transaction.
In computer systems, you can view the customers as tasks to be executed by 2 or more processors. Each processor will pick from a common line, a task that it will execute. In this article, we will analyze the performance of symmetric multiprocessing using continuous markov chain analysis. We will also be using the tool available from www.extremecomputing.org to help us compute the probabilities.
