Collective intelligence Collective action Self-organized criticality Herd mentality Phase transition Agent-based modelling Synchronization Ant colony optimization Particle swarm optimization Swarm behaviour Social network analysis Small-world networks Centrality Motifs Graph theory Scaling Robustness Systems biology Dynamic networks Evolutionary computation Genetic algorithms Genetic programming Artificial life Machine learning Evolutionary developmental biology Artificial intelligence Evolutionary robotics Reaction–diffusion systems Partial differential equations Dissipative structures Percolation Cellular automata Spatial ecology Self-replication Conversation theory Entropy Feedback Goal-oriented Homeostasis Information theory Operationalization Second-order cybernetics Self-reference System dynamics Systems science Systems thinking Sensemaking Variety Ordinary differential equations Phase space Attractors Population dynamics Chaos Multistability Bifurcation Rational choice theory Bounded rationality Scalability is the property of a system to handle a growing amount of work.
According to Marc Brooker: "a system is scalable in the range where marginal cost of additional workload is nearly constant."
In industrial engineering and manufacturing, scalability refers to the capacity of a process, system, or organization to handle a growing workload, adapt to increasing demands, and maintain operational efficiency.
In this context, scalability is a vital consideration for businesses aiming to meet customer expectations, remain competitive, and achieve sustainable growth.
Factors influencing scalability include the flexibility of the production process, the adaptability of the workforce, and the integration of advanced technologies.
By implementing scalable solutions, companies can optimize resource utilization, reduce costs, and streamline their operations.
Scalability in industrial engineering and manufacturing enables businesses to respond to fluctuating market conditions, capitalize on emerging opportunities, and thrive in an ever-evolving global landscape.
[citation needed] The Incident Command System (ICS) is used by emergency response agencies in the United States.
High-performance computing applications, such as seismic analysis and biotechnology, scale workloads horizontally to support tasks that once would have required expensive supercomputers.
Other workloads, such as large social networks, exceed the capacity of the largest supercomputer and can only be handled by scalable systems.
[7] Benefits to scale-up include avoiding increased management complexity, more sophisticated programming to allocate tasks among resources and handling issues such as throughput, latency, and synchronization across nodes.
[10] Many open-source and even commercial scale-out storage clusters, especially those built on top of standard PC hardware and networks, provide eventual consistency only, such as some NoSQL databases like CouchDB and others mentioned above.
The large amount of metadata signal traffic would require specialized hardware and short distances to be handled with acceptable performance (i.e., act like a non-clustered storage device or database).