Multicore Programming

Concurrency vs Parallelism

• A system is parallel if it can perform more than one task simultaneously.
• A concurrent system supports more than one task by allowing all the tasks to make progress.
• Thus, it is possible to have concurrency without parallelism.

Types of Parallelism

• Data parallelism focuses on distributing subsets of the same data across multiple computing cores and performing the same operation on each core.

• Task parallelism involves distributing not data but tasks (threads) across multiple computing cores.

In most instances, applications use a hybrid of these two strategies.