v980105, 5 January 1998
Parallel Processing refers to the concept of speeding-up the
execution of a program by dividing the program into multiple fragments
that can execute simultaneously, each on its own processor. A program
being executed across N processors might execute N
times faster than it would using a single processor. This document
discusses the four basic approaches to parallel processing that are
available to Linux users: SMP Linux systems, clusters of networked
Linux systems, parallel execution using multimedia instructions (i.e.,
MMX), and attached (parallel) processors hosted by a Linux system.
