Explicit parallelism: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 04:28, 29 December 2005

Revision as of 04:29, 3 January 2006

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In [[computer programming]], '''explicit parallelism''' is the representation

of concurrent computation on program codecomputations by means of primitives

in the form of special-purpose directives or function calls. Most parallel primitives are related to process sinchronization, communication or task partitioning. As they seldom contribute to actually carry out the

intendend computation of the program, their computational cost is often contabilized

as [[parallelization overhead]].

The advantage of explicitlyexplicit [[parallel programming]] is the absolute programmer

control over the parallel execution of his or her code. A skilled

parallel programmer takes advantage of explicit parallelism to produce

very efficient code. However, programming with explicit parallelism is often difficult, especially for

non computing professionals, because of the extra work involved in planning

the task division and sinchronization of concurrent processes.

In some instances, explicit parallelism may be avoided with the use of an optimizing compiler that automatically extracts the parallelism inherent to computations (see [[implicit parallelism]]).