Task parallelism: Difference between revisions

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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 by passing 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 task parallelism and data parallelism.{{citation needed|date=June 2013}}