Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!emory!hubcap!Eugene
From: eugene@orville.nas.nasa.gov (Eugene Miya)
Newsgroups: comp.parallel
Subject: parallelism terminology
Message-ID: <7884@hubcap.clemson.edu>
Date: 5 Feb 90 13:56:01 GMT
Sender: fpst@hubcap.clemson.edu
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Approved: parallel@hubcap.clemson.edu

Guido Jouret makes a very good point about terminology, but I think you
are way too late to standarize. Your bias shows by keeping the word "parallel."
This confines your thinking to geometrically restricted adjectives.
Taking a idea from Benjamin Whorf, I've suggested the following
exercise.  Work a week without using the obvious words: "parallel,
multiprocessor, concurrent, etc."  Observe the new words you start to use.
Language is far too imprecise to help[ us here.
See if the scope of what you mean changes.  It will.  Assumptions
become clearer sooner.  The physicists learned to do studying quantum
mechanics decades ago (i.e., light is particle on MWF, light is a wave
on TTS).  I detected a race condition in a problem I had over a weekago.
Here is part of the keyword list from my bibliography.

parallel
multiprocess
multiprocessor
multiprocessing
multitask
distributed
cooperative
competititive
loosely-coupled
tightly-coupled
pipelined
systolic
simultaneous
synchronous/asynchronous
vector
array
autonomous
connected/connectionist/cellular/automata
The following depend on whether you have "different" kinds of applications:
fault-tolerant
graceful degradation
reliable
dependable
Motherhood.