Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks

Chapter 7Data Parallelism

Data parallelism is like an eight-lane highway. Even though each vehicle is traveling at a relatively modest speed, the number of cars that pass a particular point is huge because many vehicles can travel side-by-side.

All the approaches we’ve discussed so far have been applicable to a wide variety of programming problems. Data-parallel programming, by contrast, is relevant only to a much narrower range. As its name suggests, it’s a parallel-programming technique, not a concurrency technique (recall that concurrency and parallelism are related but different—see ​Concurrent or Parallel?​).