parallel

Two processes are said to run in parallel if they are running at the same time.

Clearly, if the processes are running on different processors, they can in fact be running at the same time.

However, it is common to speak of two ``parallel'' processes running on the same processor at the same time, even though only one can actually be running at any given time.

John Shipman, john@nmt.edu Last updated: 1997/05/22 21:26:51 UT URL: http://www.nmt.edu/tcc/help/g/parallel.html