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Multiprocessing is the use of two or more central processing units (CPUs) within a single computer system. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] The term also refers to the ability of a system to support more than one processor or the ability to allocate tasks between them.
In this way, multiple processes are part-way through execution at a single instant, but only one process is being executed at that instant. [citation needed] Concurrent computations may be executed in parallel, [3] [6] for example, by assigning each process to a separate processor or processor core, or distributing a computation across a network.
A process with two threads of execution, running on a single processor . In computer architecture, multithreading is the ability of a central processing unit (CPU) (or a single core in a multi-core processor) to provide multiple threads of execution.
In a multiprocessor system, task parallelism is achieved when each processor executes a different thread (or process) on the same or different data. The threads may execute the same or different code. In the general case, different execution threads communicate with one another as they work, but this is not a requirement.
However, in multiprocessing systems many processes may run off of, or share, the same reentrant program at the same location in memory, but each process is said to own its own image of the program. Processes are often called "tasks" in embedded operating systems. The sense of "process" (or task) is "something that takes up time", as opposed to ...
The Concurrency Representation Theorem in the actor model provides a fairly general way to represent concurrent systems that are closed in the sense that they do not receive communications from outside. (Other concurrency systems, e.g., process calculi can be modeled in the actor model using a two-phase commit protocol. [13])
The term "multiprocessor" can be confused with the term "multiprocessing". While multiprocessing is a type of processing in which two or more processors work together to execute multiple programs simultaneously, multiprocessor refers to a hardware architecture that allows multiprocessing. [5]
As multitasking greatly improved the throughput of computers, programmers started to implement applications as sets of cooperating processes (e. g., one process gathering input data, one process processing input data, one process writing out results on disk). This, however, required some tools to allow processes to efficiently exchange data.