Using Parallelism to Improve the Performance of a Single Task

Using Parallelism to Improve the Performance of a Single Task

Virtualization provides one way of utilizing a multicore or multiprocessor system by extracting parallelism at the highest level: running multiple tasks or applications simultaneously. For a user, a compelling feature of virtualization is that utilizing this level of par-allelism becomes largely an administrative task.

But the deeper question for software developers is how multiple cores can be employed to improve the throughput or computational speed of a single application. The next section discusses a more tightly integrated parallelism for enabling such perform-ance gains.