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.

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.