How Parallel Processing Solves Our Biggest Computational Problems

Take all the help you can get. If parallel computing has a central tenet, that might be it. Some of the crazy-complex computations asked of today's hardware are so demanding that the compute burden must be borne by multiple processors, effectively "parallelizing" whatever task is being performed. Perhaps the most notable push toward parallelism happened around 2006, when tech hardware powerhouse Nvidia approached Wen-mei Hwu, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. Nvidia was designing graphics processing units (GPUs) -- which, thanks to large numbers of threads and cores, had far higher memory bandwidth than the traditional central processing unit (CPUs) -- as a way to process huge numbers of pixels.