Summary

You have now been introduced to the concept of concurrent and parallel programming. It is about designing and structuring programming commands and instructions, so that different sections of the program can be executed in an efficient order, while sharing the same resources. Since time is saved when some commands and instructions are executed at the same time, concurrent programming provides significant improvements in program execution time, as compared to traditional sequential programming.

However, various factors need to be taken into consideration while designing a concurrent program. While there are specific tasks that can easily be broken down into independent sections that can be executed in parallel (embarrassingly parallel tasks), others require different forms of coordination between the program commands, so that shared resources are used correctly and efficiently. There are also inherently sequential tasks, in which no concurrency and parallelism can be applied to achieve...