Task parallelism: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 21:20, 27 February 2013

Revision as of 08:49, 25 March 2013

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==Description==

In a multiprocessor system, task parallelism is achieved when each processor executes a different thread (or process) on the same or different data. The threads may execute the same or different code. In the general case, different execution threads communicate with one another as they work. Communication usually takes place usually toby passpassing data from one thread to the next as part of a [[workflow]].

As a simple example, if we are running code on a 2-processor system ([[CPU]]s "a" & "b") in a [[wikt:parallel|parallel]] environment and we wish to do tasks "A" and "B", it is possible to tell CPU "a" to do task "A" and CPU "b" to do task 'B" simultaneously, thereby reducing the [[Run time (program lifecycle phase)|run time]] of the execution. The tasks can be assigned using [[Conditional (programming)|conditional statement]]s as described below.

Task parallelism emphasizes the distributed (parallelized) nature of the processing (i.e. threads), as opposed to the data ([[data parallelism]]). Most real programs fall somewhere on a continuum between Tasktask parallelism and Datadata parallelism{{citation}}.

==Example==