Assume that a company has a computer configuration satisfactory for processing their monthly payroll. Further assume that the bottleneck in payroll processing is a sorting operation on all of the employee records, and that an external sorting algorithm is used. The company’s payroll program is so good that it plans to hire out its services to do payroll processing for other companies. The president has an offer from a second company with 100 times as many employees. She realizes that her computer is not up to the job of sorting 100 times as many records in an acceptable amount of time.

Describe what impact each of the following modifications to the computing system is likely to have in terms of reducing the time required to process the larger payroll database.

(a) A factor of two speedup to the CPU.

(b) A factor of two speedup to disk I/O time.

(c) A factor of two speedup to main memory access time.

(d) A factor of two increase to main memory size.