Parallel computing is a form of computation in which many calculations
are carried out simultaneously, operating on the principle that large
problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which are then solved
concurrently. There are several different forms of parallel computing:
bit-level-, instruction-level-, data-, and task parallelism. As power
consumption by computers has become a concern in recent years, parallel
computing has become the dominant paradigm in computer architecture,
mainly in the form of multicore processors. Parallel computers can be
roughly classified according to the level at which the hardware
supports parallelism—with multi-core and multi-processor computers
having multiple processing elements within a single machine, while
clusters, MPPs, and grids use multiple computers to work on the same
task. Parallel computer programs are more difficult to write than
sequential ones, because concurrency introduces several new classes of
potential software bugs, of which race conditions are the most common.
Communication and synchronization between the different subtasks are
typically one of the greatest obstacles to getting good parallel
program performance. The speed-up of a program as a result of
parallelization is given by Amdahl's law.
Read the rest of this article:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_computing>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1229:
Sixth Crusade: Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II crowned himself King of
Jerusalem, although his wife Queen Yolande of Jerusalem had died,
leaving their infant son Conrad as the rightful heir.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_II%2C_Holy_Roman_Emperor>
1871:
French President Adolphe Thiers ordered the evacuation of Paris after
an uprising broke out as the result of France's defeat in the
Franco–Prussian War, leading to the establishment of the Paris Commune
government.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune>
1892:
Canadian Governor General Frederick Stanley of Preston pledged to
donate what would become the Stanley Cup , today the oldest
professional sports trophy in North America, as an award for Canada's
top-ranking amateur ice hockey club.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Cup>
1915:
World War I: In one of the largest naval battles in the Gallipoli
Campaign, a joint British and French operation to capture
Constantinople, the defences of the Ottoman Empire sunk three Allied
battleships and severely damaged three others.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_operations_in_the_Dardanelles_Campaign>
1965:
Cosmonaut Alexey Leonov donned a space suit and ventured outside the
Voskhod 2 spacecraft, becoming the first person to walk in space.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voskhod_2>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
clairvoyant (adj):
1. Of, or relating to clairvoyance.
2. Able to see things that cannot be perceived by the normal
senses.
3. Able to foresee the future
<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clairvoyant>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause,
while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.
--Wilhelm Stekel
<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Stekel>
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