Parallel computing is the process of breaking a task into smaller parts that can be processed simultaneously by multiple processors. These notes explore the different ways of achieving parallelism in hardware and their impact on parallel computing performance...
Let's start by defining some key terms and emphasizing the distinctions between related concepts. In general those concepts are universal and may be applied to any programming language. The differences between the languages will be discussed in greater detail later, when we attempt to explain the sp...
Multiprocessing involves running multiple processes simultaneously. Each process has its own memory space, making them more isolated from each other compared to threads, which share the same memory. This isolation means that multiprocessing can be more robust and less prone to errors from shared sta...
Evaluating the performance of parallel computing systems is crucial for understanding their efficiency and identifying potential bottlenecks. Here are key metrics and concepts for evaluating performance...
Asynchronous programming is a technique used to achieve concurrency, where tasks can be executed independently without waiting for other tasks to finish. It allows for nonblocking behavior, in contrast to synchronous execution that waits for one task to complete before starting the next task...
Designing parallel programs involves breaking down computational tasks into smaller, concurrent units to be executed simultaneously. This approach leverages the power of multiple processors to enhance performance and efficiency. Key steps in this process include partitioning, communication, agglomer...
The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a standardized and portable message-passing system designed to function on a wide variety of parallel computing architectures. It provides a set of library routines that can be called from programming languages like C, C++, and Fortran to write parallel applica...
Multithreading refers to the capability of a CPU, or a single core within a multi-core processor, to execute multiple threads concurrently. A thread is the smallest unit of processing that can be scheduled by an operating system. In a multithreaded environment, a program, or process, can perform mul...