Structures for parallel processing

Parallel processing is employed to achieve high performance by replication or a unique function by interconnecting different processes. In each case the engineering problem, of providing the structure to interconnect the processors, is a combination of issues concerning not only the implementation technology but also the needs of the application. The concepts of geometric parallelism and algorithmic parallelism are introduced along with the concepts of granularity and degree of parallelism. The author discusses parallel processing paradigms and performance metrics such as latency, response crisis time and stimulus crisis time. The author discusses multi-computer systems; interconnection pathway, geometric parallelism by shared pathways, stars, rings and other topologies and the implementation of algorithmic parallelism. Parallelism within the mainframe computer is discussed. The von Neuman machine (processor-memory pair), effect of a technology performance ratio; parallelism in the processor, pipelined computers and array computers