Computer science fundamentals · Lesson 43 of 60 · Concept lesson · Optional

Concurrency and parallelism

Concurrency means managing several tasks that overlap in time, and parallelism means running them at the very same moment on different CPU cores.

Concurrency is about structure, and parallelism is about speed.

Sharing data between tasks needs care, because two tasks changing it at once can corrupt it, which is called a race condition.

Picture it

concurrent (one worker):
  A . B . A . B

parallel (two workers):
  A A A A
  B B B B

With concurrency, one worker switches between tasks A and B so both make progress. With parallelism, two workers run A and B at the same moment.

Pick an answer for each question. You can retry as many times as you like.

Loading the questions…