虽然没有完整 对并行和并发这两个术语的区别达成一致， 许多作者做了以下区分:

在并发计算中，一个程序可以在任意时刻执行多个任务。 在并行计算中，一个程序是多个任务紧密合作的程序 解决一个问题。

所以并行程序是并发的，但是像多任务操作系统这样的程序也是并发的，即使它运行在一台带有 只有一个核心，因为多个任务可以在任何时刻进行。

来源:Peter Pacheco的《并行编程介绍》

Concurrent programming regards operations that appear to overlap and is primarily concerned with the complexity that arises due to non-deterministic control flow. The quantitative costs associated with concurrent programs are typically both throughput and latency. Concurrent programs are often IO bound but not always, e.g. concurrent garbage collectors are entirely on-CPU. The pedagogical example of a concurrent program is a web crawler. This program initiates requests for web pages and accepts the responses concurrently as the results of the downloads become available, accumulating a set of pages that have already been visited. Control flow is non-deterministic because the responses are not necessarily received in the same order each time the program is run. This characteristic can make it very hard to debug concurrent programs. Some applications are fundamentally concurrent, e.g. web servers must handle client connections concurrently. Erlang, F# asynchronous workflows and Scala's Akka library are perhaps the most promising approaches to highly concurrent programming.

Multicore programming is a special case of parallel programming. Parallel programming concerns operations that are overlapped for the specific goal of improving throughput. The difficulties of concurrent programming are evaded by making control flow deterministic. Typically, programs spawn sets of child tasks that run in parallel and the parent task only continues once every subtask has finished. This makes parallel programs much easier to debug than concurrent programs. The hard part of parallel programming is performance optimization with respect to issues such as granularity and communication. The latter is still an issue in the context of multicores because there is a considerable cost associated with transferring data from one cache to another. Dense matrix-matrix multiply is a pedagogical example of parallel programming and it can be solved efficiently by using Straasen's divide-and-conquer algorithm and attacking the sub-problems in parallel. Cilk is perhaps the most promising approach for high-performance parallel programming on multicores and it has been adopted in both Intel's Threaded Building Blocks and Microsoft's Task Parallel Library (in .NET 4).

https://joearms.github.io/published/2013-04-05-concurrent-and-parallel-programming.html

并发=两个队列和一台咖啡机。

并行=两个队列和两个咖啡机。

并发性和并行性源

在单个处理器上的多线程进程中，处理器可以在线程之间切换执行资源，从而实现并发执行。

在共享内存多处理器环境中的同一个多线程进程中，进程中的每个线程可以同时在单独的处理器上运行，从而导致并行执行。

当进程的线程数量与处理器数量相同或较少时，线程支持系统结合操作环境确保每个线程运行在不同的处理器上。

例如，在具有相同数量的线程和处理器的矩阵乘法中，每个线程(和每个处理器)计算结果的一行。

我认为并发编程指的是多线程编程，它是关于让你的程序运行多个线程，从硬件细节中抽象出来。

并行编程是指专门设计程序算法以利用可用的并行执行。例如，您可以并行执行某些算法的两个分支，期望它会比先检查第一个分支再检查第二个分支更快地到达结果(平均而言)。

它们是从(非常轻微的)不同的角度描述同一件事情的两个短语。并行编程是从硬件的角度描述情况——至少有两个处理器(可能在一个物理包中)并行处理一个问题。并发编程更多地是从软件的角度描述事情——两个或多个操作可能同时(并发)发生。

这里的问题是，人们试图用这两个短语来做出明确的区分，但实际上这两个短语并不存在。现实情况是，几十年来，他们试图划定的分界线一直是模糊的，而且随着时间的推移越来越模糊。

What they're trying to discuss is the fact that once upon a time, most computers had only a single CPU. When you executed multiple processes (or threads) on that single CPU, the CPU was only really executing one instruction from one of those threads at a time. The appearance of concurrency was an illusion--the CPU switching between executing instructions from different threads quickly enough that to human perception (to which anything less than 100 ms or so looks instantaneous) it looked like it was doing many things at once.

与此形成鲜明对比的是具有多个CPU或多核CPU的计算机，因此机器正在同时执行来自多个线程和/或进程的指令;执行其中一个的代码不能/不会对执行另一个的代码产生任何影响。

Now the problem: such a clean distinction has almost never existed. Computer designers are actually fairly intelligent, so they noticed a long time ago that (for example) when you needed to read some data from an I/O device such as a disk, it took a long time (in terms of CPU cycles) to finish. Instead of leaving the CPU idle while that happened, they figured out various ways of letting one process/thread make an I/O request, and let code from some other process/thread execute on the CPU while the I/O request completed.

因此，早在多核cpu成为标准之前，我们就有多个线程并行进行操作。

That's only the tip of the iceberg though. Decades ago, computers started providing another level of parallelism as well. Again, being fairly intelligent people, computer designers noticed that in a lot of cases, they had instructions that didn't affect each other, so it was possible to execute more than one instruction from the same stream at the same time. One early example that became pretty well known was the Control Data 6600. This was (by a fairly wide margin) the fastest computer on earth when it was introduced in 1964--and much of the same basic architecture remains in use today. It tracked the resources used by each instruction, and had a set of execution units that executed instructions as soon as the resources on which they depended became available, very similar to the design of most recent Intel/AMD processors.

But (as the commercials used to say) wait--that's not all. There's yet another design element to add still further confusion. It's been given quite a few different names (e.g., "Hyperthreading", "SMT", "CMP"), but they all refer to the same basic idea: a CPU that can execute multiple threads simultaneously, using a combination of some resources that are independent for each thread, and some resources that are shared between the threads. In a typical case this is combined with the instruction-level parallelism outlined above. To do that, we have two (or more) sets of architectural registers. Then we have a set of execution units that can execute instructions as soon as the necessary resources become available. These often combine well because the instructions from the separate streams virtually never depend on the same resources.

然后，当然，我们会讲到具有多核的现代系统。这里的情况很明显，对吧?我们有N个(目前大约在2到256之间)独立的内核，它们都可以同时执行指令，所以我们有了真正的并行性的清晰案例——在一个进程/线程中执行指令不会影响在另一个进程/线程中执行指令。

嗯，算是吧。即使在这里，我们也有一些独立的资源(寄存器、执行单元、至少一个级别的缓存)和一些共享资源(通常至少是最低级别的缓存，当然还有内存控制器和内存带宽)。

To summarize: the simple scenarios people like to contrast between shared resources and independent resources virtually never happen in real life. With all resources shared, we end up with something like MS-DOS, where we can only run one program at a time, and we have to stop running one before we can run the other at all. With completely independent resources, we have N computers running MS-DOS (without even a network to connect them) with no ability to share anything between them at all (because if we can even share a file, well, that's a shared resource, a violation of the basic premise of nothing being shared).

每个有趣的案例都涉及到独立资源和共享资源的某种组合。每一台相当现代的计算机(以及许多根本不现代的计算机)都至少有一些能力同时执行至少几个独立的操作，而任何比MS-DOS更复杂的东西都至少在某种程度上利用了这一点。

人们喜欢在“并发”和“并行”之间画出的漂亮、清晰的分界线根本不存在，而且几乎从来都不存在。人们喜欢归类为“并发”的东西通常仍然包含至少一种或更多不同类型的并行执行。他们喜欢归类为“并行”的内容通常涉及共享资源，(例如)一个进程在使用两个进程之间共享的资源时阻塞另一个进程的执行。

试图在“并行”和“并发”之间划清界限的人，其实是生活在一个从未真正存在过的计算机幻想中。