Parallel computing
programming paradigm in which many calculations or the execution of processes are carried out simultaneously
Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different forms of parallel computing: bit-level, instruction-level, data, and task parallelism. Parallelism has long been employed in high-performance computing, but has gained broader interest due to the physical constraints preventing frequency scaling. As power consumption (and consequently heat generation) by computers has become a concern in recent years, parallel computing has become the dominant paradigm in computer architecture, mainly in the form of multi-core processors.
In computer science, parallelism and concurrency are two different things: a parallel program uses multiple CPU cores, each core performing a task independently. On the other hand, concurrency enables a program to deal with multiple tasks even on a single CPU core; the core switches between tasks (i.e. threads) without necessarily completing each one. A program can have both, neither or a combination of parallelism and concurrency characteristics.
Parallel computers can be roughly classified according to the level at which the hardware supports parallelism, with multi-core and multi-processor computers having multiple processing elements within a single machine, while clusters, MPPs, and grids use multiple computers to work on the same task.
The public source identifies “Parallel computing” as programming paradigm in which many calculations or the execution of processes are carried out simultaneously. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Parallel, computing and programming.
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This entry incorporates text from “Parallel computing” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.