parallel A feature of a programming language for a
parallelprocessing system which decides automatically which parts to
run in parallel.
The best way of providing implicit parallelism is still (1995)
an active research topic. The problem is to generate the
right number of parallel tasks of the right size (or
"
granularity"). Too many tasks and the system gets bogged
down in house-keeping, or memory for waiting tasks runs out,
too few tasks and processors are left idle.
The best performance is usually achieved with
explicitparallelism where the programmer can annotate his program to
indicate which parts should be executed as independent
parallel tasks.
(1995-02-16)