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Paradigms for Parallel Processing

The evolution of parallel processing, even if slow, gave rise to a considerable variety of programming paradigms.

Independently from the specific paradigm considered, in order to execute a program which exploits parallelism, the programming language must supply the means to:

  1. identify parallelism, by recognizing the components of the program execution that will be (potentially) performed by different processors;
  2. start and stop parallel executions;
  3. coordinate the parallel executions (e.g., specify and implement interactions between concurrent components).

It is custom to separate the approaches to parallel processing into explicit versus implicit parallelism.





'Enrico
Tue Mar 19 14:37:09 MST 1996