{}

Software → Programming

Parallelism

Executing multiple computations at the same time, usually on multiple cores or processors.

Motivation

Parallelism solves the problem of making work happen at the same time on multiple execution resources.

Where it fits

Parallelism belongs to concurrency, operating systems, and performance engineering.

Mental model

Concurrency is about structure; parallelism is about simultaneous execution.

Common mistakes

Using parallelism for I/O-bound bottlenecks without measuring.
Ignoring coordination overhead.

Parallelism connects to concurrency, multithreading, multiprocessing, CPU, and distributed systems.