In this section we consider the running time of a program to compute the following geometric series summation . That is, given a value x and non-negative integer n, we wish to compute the summation
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An algorithm to compute this summation
is given in Program
.
Table
gives the running time,
as predicted by the simplified model,
for each of the executable statements in Program
.
| statement | time |
| 5 | 2 |
| 6a | 2 |
| 6b | 3(n+2) |
| 6c | 4(n+1) |
| 8 | 2(n+1) |
| 9a | 2(n+1) |
| 9b | |
| 9c | |
| 10 | |
| 11 | 4(n+1) |
| 13 | 2 |
| TOTAL | |
In order to calculate the total cycle counts,
we need to evaluate the two series summations
and
.
Both of these are
arithmetic series summations .
In the next section we show
that the sum of the series
is n(n+1)/2.
Using this result we can sum the cycle counts
given in Table
to arrive at the total running time of
cycles.