The use of timing models can give insight to possible performance of codes. Also, some codes can be restructured to have more independent parts. The modified heat transfer problem for the thin wire resulted in a more restrictive stability condition on the time step. In this case, this restriction was not too severe as the problem reached the steady state solution very quickly. However, if the surrounding temperature is a function of time, this may not happen over such a short time interval.
Many computer simulations range over periods of years.
In such cases these restrictions on the time step may be too severe. Later we will describe alternative methods to the explicit time discretization. Consider the dotproduct example of Amdahl's timing model. Assume the performance of each CPU is the same. Use the above Maple code and observe the stability condition.