Parallelism vs. Concurrency

The term Parallelism refers to techniques to make programs faster by performing several computations in parallel. This requires hardware with multiple processing units. In many cases the sub-computations are of the same structure, but this is not necessary. Graphic computations on a GPU are parallelism.

The term Concurrency refers to techniques that make program more usable. Concurrency can be implemented and is used a lot on single processing units, nonetheless it may benefit from multiple processing units with respect to speed. If an operating system is called a multi-tasking operating system, this is a synonym for supporting concurrency. If you can load multiple documents simultaneously in the tabs of your browser and you can still open menus and perform more actions, this is concurrency. If you run distributed-net computations in the background, that is concurrency.

Let me tell an anecdote to further sharpen the difference: Amiga computers were always advertised for their multi-tasking operating system. However DOS/Windows-3.1 users were never attracted by this advertisement since they argued that a single CPU cannot be made faster by performing several tasks in an interleaved way. They were right, but this was not the point: Multitasking allows to avoid that the computer gets bored. Indeed in the eighties Amiga computers were considered great for raytracing. However the special graphics and sound hardware in Amiga computers could not help with raytracing. The important advantage was, that you could perform the graphics rendering concurrently to your daily work (office applications) without noticing the computation load of the raytracing. Multitasking just assigns the time between your keystrokes to the raytracer. However multitasking was not possible with most games, office software that eats all the memory or simply crashing applications. This leads to another confusing area: Error vs. Exception.

This article is written by Henning Thielemann. Other authors may use the terms 'parallelism' and 'concurrency' in different ways or do not distinguish them at all.

See also

• Note of Simon Marlow in Haskell-Cafe about the distinction of parallelism and concurrency