Implicit parallelism

Updated: 04/26/2017 by Computer Hope

A programming language is said to be implicitly parallel if its compiler or interpreter can recognize opportunities for parallelization and implement them without being told to do so.

Example of implicit parallelism

Imagine you have an array of numbers, and you must find the square root of each number. It might be efficient to parallelize an operation like this across multiple cores. If you had to write special code that directly instructs the computer to parallelize, it would be an example of explicit parallelism. Implicit parallelism is where the language notices that you are taking a lot of square roots and parallelizes the process for you behind the scenes.

Implicitly parallel programming languages

  • Microsoft Axum
  • MATLAB's M-code
  • ZPL (Zebra Programming Language)
  • LabVIEW (Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench).
  • NESL
  • SISAL (Streams and Iteration in a Single Assignment Language)
  • HPF (High-Performance Fortran).

Fortran, MATLAB, Parallelization, Programming, Programming terms