Parallelism Glossary

Browse 7 parallelism terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

7 Parallelism Terms

Barrier: A synchronization point where multiple threads or tasks must all arrive before any of them can continue past that stage. Barriers are used in parallel...
Coforall: A parallel loop construct in the Chapel programming language that creates a separate task for each iteration, executing all iterations concurrently. Unlike...
Concurrency: The ability of a system to handle multiple tasks that are in progress at the same time, though not necessarily executing simultaneously. Concurrency is about...
Kafka Partition: A Kafka topic is split into ordered, immutable partitions that enable parallel consumption. Messages with the same key always go to the same partition...
Process Pool: A pre-forked collection of worker processes managed by a parent that dispatches tasks to idle workers and collects results, amortizing the overhead of process...
SIMD: Single Instruction, Multiple Data — a CPU capability that applies one operation to multiple data elements simultaneously. A single SIMD instruction can add 8...
Worker Pool: A collection of pre-spawned threads or processes that wait for tasks on a shared queue, amortizing the cost of thread/process creation across many jobs and...