Technology Fundamentals
Parallelism
Definition
Parallelism is the ability of a computer to perform multiple computations or execute processes simultaneously. It requires hardware with multiple processing units, such as a multi-core processor or multiple processors in a single computer.
Why It Matters
Parallelism is the key to high-performance computing. By breaking a large problem into smaller pieces and running them in parallel on multiple CPU or GPU cores, we can solve massive computational problems much faster.
Contextual Example
Video rendering is often done in parallel. The task of rendering a 3D scene is split up, and different parts of the image are rendered simultaneously on different cores of a GPU, significantly speeding up the process.
Common Misunderstandings
- Parallelism is about doing lots of things at once. Concurrency is about dealing with lots of things at once.
- Not all problems can be easily parallelized. Some tasks are inherently sequential and cannot be sped up by adding more processors.