Parallelization Patterns

Parallelization Patterns

There are many ways that work can be divided among multiple threads. The objective of this section is to provide an overview of the most common approaches and to indicate when these might be appropriate.

Broadly speaking, there are two categories of parallelization, often referred to as data parallel and task parallel.

A data parallel application has multiple threads performing the same operation on separate items of data. For example, multiple threads could each take a chunk of iterations from a single loop and perform those iterations on different elements in a single array. All the threads would perform the same task but to different array indexes.

A task parallel application would have separate threads performing different operations on different items of data. For example, an animated film could be produced having one process render each frame and then a separate process take each rendered frame and incorporate it into a compressed version of the entire film.