Parallel Processing
Noun · Development
Definitions
The simultaneous execution of multiple computations across separate CPU cores or processors to reduce wall-clock time. Unlike concurrency (which interleaves tasks on fewer cores), true parallelism requires multiple hardware execution units and is bounded by Amdahl's law — the serial portion of a workload limits the maximum speedup.
In plain English: Splitting work into pieces that run at the exact same time on different processor cores, so the job finishes faster.
Example: "We parallelized the image resize pipeline across 16 cores and cut the batch processing time from 4 hours to 20 minutes."