Concurrency and Parallelism
Concurrency vs. parallelism
- Concurrency is about dealing with lots of things at once.
- Parallelism is about doing lots of things at once.
- Not the same, but related.
- Concurrency is about structure, parallelism is about execution.
- Concurrency provides a way to structure a solution to solve a problem that may (but not necessarily) be parallelizable.
Concurrency plus communication
- Concurrency is a way to structure a program by breaking it into pieces that can be executed independently.
- Communication is the means to coordinate the independent executions.
Conclusion
- Concurrency is powerful.
- Concurrency is not parallelism.
- Concurrency enables parallelism.
- Concurrency makes parallelism (and scaling and everything else) easy.
