ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a brief review of parallel processing and parallel machines. A number of cognition scientists and artificial intelligence researchers have argued that human intelligence is due to the interaction of a large number of simple processing units. Multiprocessors are classified as tightly coupled systems and loosely coupled systems. In a tightly coupled system processors cooperate closely on the solution to a problem. In a distributed multiprocessor each processor has a private or local memory but there is no global shared memory in the system. Multiprocessing can be classified into three categories: throughput-oriented multiprocessing, availability-oriented multiprocessing, and response-oriented or parallel processing. In response-oriented multiprocessing or parallel processing the goal is to maximize the number of cooperating processes done in parallel or to minimize the response time. In 1985 Encore Corporation introduced its Multimax single-bus shared-memory multiprocessor. The efficiency of interprocessor communication is a major factor in the performance of processor networks.
