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In general, a system that contains 2^N processors with each processor directly connected to N other processors, the diameter of the system is N. One disadvantage of a hypercube system is that it must be configured in powers of two, so a machine must be built that could potentially have many more processors than is really needed for the application.
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 ...
Multiprocessing however means true parallel execution of multiple processes using more than one processor. [7] Multiprocessing doesn't necessarily mean that a single process or task uses more than one processor simultaneously; the term parallel processing is generally used to denote that scenario. [ 6 ]
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.
A massively parallel processor (MPP) is a single computer with many networked processors. MPPs have many of the same characteristics as clusters, but MPPs have specialized interconnect networks (whereas clusters use commodity hardware for networking). MPPs also tend to be larger than clusters, typically having "far more" than 100 processors. [53]