Advanced Python Programming

Concurrent versus parallel

At this point, if you have had some experience in parallel programming, you might be wondering whether concurrency is any different from parallelism. The key difference between concurrent and parallel programming is that, while in parallel programs there are a number of processing flows (mainly CPUs and cores) working independently all at once, there might be different processing flows (mostly threads) accessing and using a shared resource at the same time in concurrent programs.

Since this shared resource can be read and overwritten by any of the different processing flows, some form of coordination is required at times, when the tasks that need to be executed are not entirely independent from one another. In other ...