Talk:Parallel programming

Parallelism versus concurrency

Can someone point me to a reference that really differentiates between parallel programming and concurrent programming, as the article says at the moment? I seem unable to verify this statement. Koffieyahoo 8 July 2005 10:09 (UTC)

The article below discusses parallel programming.--Carl Hewitt 21:16, 11 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Henry Baker and Carl Hewitt The Incremental Garbage Collection of Processes Proceeding of the Symposium on Artificial Intelligence Programming Languages. SIGPLAN Notices 12, August 1977.

Explain me how this is relvant. As far as I can see the article doesn't even mention the word concurrency. In addition I asked some experts in the field what they think the difference is between parallelism and concurrency and most of them either see the two words as symonymous or the see concurrency as parallel processing involving threads on one computer and parallel programming as involving multiple computers. -- Koffieyahoo 12:48, 13 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The paper cited above discusses parallel programming issues. For example it introduced the future construct for parallelism.--Carl Hewitt 14:15, 13 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hence, it obviously does not answer my question. Thank you for admitting that. Now can someone please answer it? -- Koffieyahoo 14:32, 13 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The article begins

"Parallel programming is a computer programming technique that provides for the execution of operations in parallel, either within a single computer, or across a number of systems. In the latter case, the term distributed computing is used

Parallel programming is now often considered to be a special case of concurrent programming because parallism by itself does not require the use of shared resources that can change."--Carl Hewitt 15:03, 13 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I can read the article. Can you now please anwer my question. I have a very hard time to verify the facts you quote, as I already mentioned above. -- Koffieyahoo 12:19, 15 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Which word do you not understand? Seriously, I do not understand your problem!--Carl Hewitt 21:14, 21 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

You make a distiction bewteen concurrent and parallel programming. I cannot verify this distinction in any of my resources, please point me to a resource where this distiction is made. Koffieyahoo 09:53, 4 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

See for example the CONCUR conferences.--Carl Hewitt 11:30, 4 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Can you give me real reference to a paper? Because I can give a reference that claims that there is a distiction, but different than what you claim: G.R. Andrews, Concurrent Programming, principles and practice, Addison-Wesley, p. 3. Andrews basically says that parallel programming is exactly the same as concurrent programming except that a multiprocessor is used for execution in the case of parallel progromming while this does not need to be the case with concurrent programming. -- Koffieyahoo 12:42, 19 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It doesn't make much sense to appeal to a piece of equipment such as a multiprocessor that might be used in implementation as a means to distinguish between fundamental catetories like parallelism and concurrency.--Carl Hewitt 15:40, 19 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Then, please for the fifth time, provide a reference that shows there is such a fundamental difference between parallelism and concurrency! (I'm hoping you're starting to understand that not everyone distinguishes parallelism from concurrency in the way you do and, hence, that it stutus in the article should be different from what it is now (e.g. discussion on the different ways in which the words are used). -- Koffieyahoo 09:23, 23 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]