 parallel computing is a form of computation in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously, operating on the principle that large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which are then solved concurrently ("in parallel"). there are several different forms of parallel computing: bit-level, instruction level, data, and task parallelism. parallelism has been employed for many years, mainly in high-performance computing, but interest in it has grown lately due to the physical constraints preventing frequency scaling.s.v. adve et al. (november 2008). "parallel computing research at illinois: the upcrc agenda" (pdf). parallel@illinois, university of illinois at urbana-champaign. "the main techniques for these performance benefits&nbsp;â increased clock frequency and smarter but increasingly complex architectures&nbsp;â are now hitting the so-called power wall. the computer industry has accepted that future performance increases must largely come from increasing the number of processors (or cores) on a die, rather than making a single core go faster." as power consumption (and consequently heat generation) by computers has become a concern in recent years,asanovic et al. old [conventional wisdom]: power is free, but transistors are expensive. new [conventional wisdom] is [that] power is expensive, but transistors are "free". parallel computing has become the dominant paradigm in computer architecture, mainly in the form of multi-core processors.asanovic, krste et al. (december 18, 2006). "the landscape of parallel computing research: a view from berkeley" (pdf). university of california, berkeley. technical report no. ucb/eecs-2006-183. "old [conventional wisdom]: increasing clock frequency is the primary method of improving processor performance. new [conventional wisdom]: increasing parallelism is the primary method of improving processor performance&nbsp;... even representatives from intel, a company generally associated with the 'higher clock-speed is better' position, warned that traditional approaches to maximizing performance through maximizing clock speed have been pushed to their limit." parallel computers can be roughly classified according to the level at which the hardware supports parallelism, with
Parallel_computing