Parallel Processing refers to the concept of speeding up
the execution of a program by dividing the program into
multiple fragments that can execute simultaneously, each on
its own processor.
A program being executed across N
processors might execute N times faster than it would using
a single processor. This document discusses the four basic
approaches to parallel processing that are available to
Linux users: SMP Linux systems, clusters of networked Linux
systems, parallel execution using multimedia instructions
(i.e., MMX), and attached (parallel) processors hosted by
a Linux system.