por Do you already know what computational parallelism and concurrency are? If you are part of the world of technological development and programming, it is likely that you have already heard about these concepts and their uses, but do you know what their differences are? In case you don’t know and want to deepen your knowledge, stay with this article to learn everything you need to know about parallel and concurrent programming.
Parallelism and concurrency: definition
Before knowing the differences between parallelism and computational concurrency, it is worth talking about the respective definitions between parallel and concurrent programming.
Computational parallelism
Computational parallelism or parallel computing is defined as the programming technique that divides large problems into smaller sections that will be resolved in parallel, that is, from the execution of multiple instructions simultaneously. For this, it uses two or more processors in charge of solving the tasks.
Parallelism is also related to the capacity of the system in which the program is executed, as well as its available resources.
Concurrence computational
Concurrent programming is understood as a methodology that is implemented with the objective of solving problems by executing different programming tasks. One of its characteristics is that It allows the system to continue its activities without needing to start or end other tasks.
So concurrent programming includes ability to reduce system response time, implementing only one processing unit. This implies that the task is divided into multiple parts that are processed simultaneously, but not at the same time.
Parallelism and computational concurrency: differences
As you have seen, the terms parallel and concurrent computational programming can be similar if they are not analyzed carefully. However, these programming methodologies can be differentiated, since while that attendance focuses more on the design of the softwarethe parallelism is related to its execution.
Likewise, it is possible to propose a differentiation with regard to the procedure of concurrency and parallelism, since, on the one hand, Parallelism executes multiple tasks simultaneously, and on the other hand, computational concurrency executes and manages various tasks at the same time.. This means that concurrency contributes to the processing of several tasks at the same time and parallelism is responsible for solving a single task more efficiently.
The requirements of parallelism and concurrency also allow us to mark a distance, because, in the case of parallelism, the implementation of various processing units is necessary, while computational concurrency can be carried out using only one processing unit. In the same way, For parallel programming or parallelism, multiple cores are required that are in charge of each of its processes, while for the execution of concurrency computing only one core is needed, so its cost per hardware is inferior.
Another difference between parallelism and computational concurrency is related to the capabilities achieved by each of these methodologies. In this way, the Concurrent programming or concurrency is used thanks to its properties to increase the amount of work completed at a time, while reducing response time. For its part, parallelism is responsible for increasing the performance of the system and making execution faster.
What is the next step?
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