Introduction to Parallel Computing – Disc 3

Primary Response: Within the Discussion Board area, write 300–500 words that respond to the following questions with your thoughts, ideas, and comments. This will be the foundation for future discussions by your classmates. Be substantive and clear, and use examples to reinforce your ideas.

For this Discussion Board, please complete the following:

Please copy the prompts of the Primary Response to a piece of paper, read them a couple of times to understand the questions fully, and then read through the sections below before writing your answers to the questions.

In parallel computing, concurrency, parallelism, and decomposition are three important concepts. The three tutorial videos below will help you to accurately understand their definitions and relationships.

This video discusses the difference between concurrency and parallelism.

This video explains three different decomposition techniques for dividing a complicated computation into multiple smaller pieces so that each of them can be processed in parallel.

This video explores all three concepts together.

Primary Response

Please discuss the following:

• Conceptually, what is the main difference between concurrency and parallelism? Please use at least 1 example to support your answer.
• Among all of the decomposition techniques that you have learned from the videos, which one would you use? Why?
• In the task decomposition, the dependence relationships among the tasks are critical in terms of how to assign tasks to multiple threads or processors to be processed in parallel. Use 1 example to explain the reason behind this.