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What does "parallelism" mean in programming?

parallelism is one of the most common terms in software development. This guide explains what it means, how it is used in practice, and why it matters, with real examples from the developer world.

Definition

Executing multiple tasks at exactly the same time on separate CPU cores or machines. Parallelism requires true simultaneous execution, unlike concurrency which can be interleaved on a single core. Most effective for CPU-bound tasks like image processing or data transformation.

Example

"The image resizing job uses parallelism — each worker core processes a separate batch of images simultaneously."

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