ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors prepare you to step into the real world of parallelism that forms the basis of today’s computing, such as Grid and Cloud Computing. A pipeline is like an assembly line. In a car assembly production line, there are many steps, every of which is dedicated to constructing part of the car. The time it takes to move an instruction from one step to another in the pipeline is called the processor cycle. The pipelining approach reduces the average execution time per instruction. The iterative operations of an algorithm are usually expressed as a loop to obtain a compact and elegant form of code. Superscalar processing is the ability to initiate multiple instructions during the same clock cycle. A typical superscalar processor fetches and decodes the input instruction stream at a time. A thread is a path of execution through a program. It is a runnable entity that belongs to one and only one process.
