July 2007
Intermediate to advanced
332 pages
10h 4m
English
Data parallelism is eventually limited by the amount of data you want to process, and your thoughts will then turn to task parallelism (Figure 2-2). Task parallelism means lots of different, independent tasks that are linked by sharing the data they consume. This, too, can be embarrassingly parallel. Figure 2-2 uses as examples some mathematical operations that can each be applied to the same data set to compute values that are independent. In this case, the average value, the minimum value, the binary OR function, and the geometric mean of the data set are computed.

Figure 2-2. Task parallelism