Parallelism + Vectors — HIGH PRIORITY

Parallelism

Performing multiple operations or tasks at the same time to improve performance.

Flynn's taxonomy

Classification of computer architectures based on the number of instruction streams and data streams.

SISD

Single Instruction, Single Data; one processor executes one instruction stream on one data stream.

SIMD

Single Instruction, Multiple Data; the same instruction operates on multiple pieces of data simultaneously.

MISD

Multiple Instruction, Single Data; multiple instruction streams operate on the same data stream.

MIMD

Multiple Instruction, Multiple Data; multiple processors execute different instructions on different data simultaneously.

Vector

An ordered collection of multiple data values.

Vector processing

Performing the same operation on many data elements at once.

Vector processor

Processor designed to perform operations efficiently on entire vectors of data.

Vector instruction

A single instruction that performs an operation on multiple data elements.

SIMD and vectors

Vector processing commonly uses SIMD because one instruction is applied to multiple data values.

Multicore processor

CPU containing two or more processing cores capable of executing tasks independently.

Thread-level parallelism

Running multiple threads simultaneously across processor cores.

Data-level parallelism

Performing the same operation on multiple pieces of data simultaneousl