4 pages

Parallel Computing

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 concurrently. There are several different forms of parallel computing: bit-level, instruction-level, data, and task parallelism. Parallelism has long been used in high-performance computing, but has gained broader interest as physical limitations have hindered frequency scaling. In recent years, as power consumption (and the resulting heat) of computers has become a concern, parallel computing has become a dominant paradigm in computer architecture, primarily in the form of multi-core processors.