并发编程在一般意义上是指我们定义的任务可以以任何顺序发生的环境。一个 任务可以发生在另一个任务之前或之后，并且部分或所有任务可以 同时进行的。 并行编程是特指在不同的处理器上同时执行并发任务。因此,所有 并行编程是并发的，但不是所有的并发编程 是平行的。

来源:PThreads Programming -一个更好的多处理POSIX标准，Buttlar, Farrell, Nichols

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).

并发编程是一个通用概念，即一个程序可以以未定义的完成顺序执行多个任务，并且这些任务可以同时执行，也可以不同时执行。

并行编程只是一种并发编程，其中这些任务运行在同时执行的线程上。

我真的不理解这里许多过于冗长的回答，这些回答似乎暗示并行编程和并行编程是不同的编程方法，它们并不重叠。

如果你在写一个并行程序，根据定义，你是在写一个并发程序的特殊情况。这些年来，术语似乎被不必要地混淆和复杂化了。

关于并发编程最好、最详细的报道之一是Joe Duffy所著的《Windows上的并发编程》一书。这本书定义了并发，然后继续解释各种操作系统资源，库等可用来编写“并行”程序，如。net中的任务并行库。

第5页:

并行性是使用并发性将操作分解为 粒度更细的组成部分，以便独立的部分可以运行 机器上的独立处理器"

同样，并行编程只是一种特殊类型的并发编程，其中多个线程/任务将同时运行。

PS 我一直不喜欢在编程中，并发和并行这两个词有如此多的含义。例:在编程之外的广阔世界里，“篮球比赛将并行进行”和“篮球比赛将并行进行”是完全相同的。

想象一下，在开发者大会上，他们在第一天宣传会议将“并行”运行，但第二天他们将“并发”运行，这是多么可笑的困惑。那会很搞笑的!

并发:在单核机器上，多任务以cpu时间片共享的方式运行。 并行:在多核机器上，多个任务同时在每个核上运行。

并行编程发生在代码同时被执行并且每次执行都是相互独立的时候。因此，通常不会有关于共享变量之类的关注，因为那不太可能发生。

However, concurrent programming consists on code being executed by different processes/threads that share variables and such, therefore on concurrent programming we must establish some sort of rule to decide which process/thread executes first, we want this so that we can be sure there will be consistency and that we can know with certainty what will happen. If there is no control and all threads compute at the same time and store things on the same variables, how would we know what to expect in the end? Maybe a thread is faster than the other, maybe one of the threads even stopped in the middle of its execution and another continued a different computation with a corrupted (not yet fully computed) variable, the possibilities are endless. It's in these situations that we usually use concurrent programming instead of parallel.