Red-Blue Pebble Game: Analyzing Matmul Communication Overhead

srush_nlp · x · 2026-08-20

The tweet references the Red-Blue Pebble game rules (Hong & Kung, 1981) to analyze computational complexity versus communication costs.

Rules Defined:

Conclusion:

Under this communication model, naive $O(n^3)$ matrix multiplication scales well with cache size (red pebbles), indicating its data access pattern has good locality.

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