Motivations for parallelism
Introduction to parallelism and parallel architectures

The notion of parallelism is often associated with that of application execution performance. The latter term covers different notions, depending on application needs. Whatever the application domain, parallelism can be exploited to meet two needs: processing power and/or availability.

Processing power covers two main concepts: processing time and processing throughput. The former is the time required to execute a process. The second represents the number of executable processes per...