In technology circles, parallelism is also often called concurrency. It is the computing construct that allows a microprocessor to drive two (or more) separate processes at the same time.

One of the things to avoid when it comes to parallelism is working with raw threads. Abstraction offers a way around the issue, by avoiding the need to deal with low-level details of parallel systems ...

Research in both chip and compiler design promises more and more parallelism — and, hence, performance gains — largely shielded from view by the user [Computerworld, Future Watch, Sept. 24].