Identifying Opportunities for Parallelism

Chapter 3

Identifying Opportunities for Parallelism

This chapter discusses parallelism, from the use of virtualization to support multiple operating systems to the use of multiple threads within a single application. It also covers the concepts involved in writing parallel programs, some ways of visualizing parallel tasks, and ways of architecting parallel applications. The chapter continues with a discus-sion of various parallelization strategies, or patterns. It concludes by examining some of the limitations to parallelization. By the end of the chapter, you should be in a position to understand some of the ways that a system can support multiple applications and that an existing application might be modified to utilize multiple threads. You will also be able to identify places in the code where parallelization might be applicable.