Category Concurrency

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Design Patterns concerned with concurrency issues are collected in the Category Concurrency Patterns.

Aliases: Parallelism, Parallel Programming.

Concurrency vs. Parallelism: since people get these confused all the time.

concurrency is a semantic property. You know two tasks T1 and T2 are 'concurrent' if this can express itself in the program semantics. This often manifests in the form of indeterminism and Race Conditions, but there are also forms of deterministic concurrency where reasoning about program liveness requires knowing that certain program elements are concurrent.

parallelism is an implementation property. Two tasks T1 and T2 are 'parallel' if they are computed at the same time.

In general, concurrency allows for parallelism, but does not strongly imply it. That is, one may sequentially execute a concurrent program, only interleaving when synchronization between tasks is required. Further, parallelism does not imply concurrency; it is often possible for an optimizer to take programs with no semantic concurrency and break them down into parallel components via such techniques as task pipelines, wide vector SIMD operations, divide-and-conquer.

These concepts aren't even especially related in practice. There is great interest in Parallel Programming from the scientific and multimedia (e.g. motion picture) industries. There is great interest in concurrency from the distributed systems and systems software folk. Fortunately, it is often possible to combine the techniques in a (mostly) orthogonal manner.