A generic term used to reference a hardware element that executes a stream of instructions. The context defines what unit of hardware is considered a processing element. Consider a cluster of SMP work [..]

A data type given by its set of allowed values and the available operations on those values. The values and operations are defined independently of a particular representation of the values or impleme [..]

Abstraction can have several meanings depending on the context. In software, it often means combining a set of small operations or data items and giving them a name. For example, control abstraction t [..]

The range of memory locations that a process or processor can access. Depending on context, this could refer to either physical or virtual memory.  

See abstract data type.  

A law stating that (under certain assumptions) the maximum speedup that can be obtained by running an algorithm on a system of P processors is S(P)

of the program, and T(n) is the total execution time running on n processors. See speedup and serial fraction.  

This is one of the main techniques for introducing parallelism into a logic language. Consider the goal A: B,C,D (read ``A follows from B and C and D'') which means that goal A succeeds if a [..]

See application programming interface.  

An API defines the calling conventions and other information needed for one software module (typically an application program) to utilize the services provided by another software module. MPI is an AP [..]