What is the difference between concurrency and parallelism?

Question

What is the difference between concurrency and parallelism?

Examples are appreciated.

Answer 1

I will try to explain with a interesting and easy to understand example. :)

Assume that a organization organizes a chess tournament where 10 players (with equal chess playing skills) will challenge a professional champion chess player. And since chess is 1:1 game thus organizers have to conduct 10 games in time efficient manner so that they can finish the whole event as quickly as possible.

Hopefully following scenarios will easily describe multiple ways of conducting these 10 games:

1) SERIAL - lets say that the professional plays with each person one by one i.e. starts and finishes the game with one person and then starts the next game with next person and so on. In other words, they decided to conduct the games sequentially. So if one game takes 10 mins to complete then 10 games will take 100 mins, also assume that transition from one game to other takes 6 secs then for 10 games it will be 54 secs (approx. 1 min).

so the whole event will approximately complete in 101 mins (WORST APPROACH)

2) CONCURRENT - lets say that professional plays his turn and moves on to next player so all 10 players are playing simultaneously but the professional player is not with two person at a time, he plays his turn and moves on to next person. Now assume professional player takes 6 sec to play his turn and also transition time of professional player b/w two players is 6 sec so total transition time to get back to first player will be 1min (10x6sec). Therefore, by the time he is back to first person with, whom event was started, 2mins have passed (10xtime_per_turn_by_champion + 10xtransition_time=2mins)

Assuming that all player take 45sec to complete their turn so based on 10mins per game from SERIAL event the no. of rounds before a game finishes should 600/(45+6) = 11 rounds (approx)

So the whole event will approximately complete in 11xtime_per_turn_by_player_&_champion + 11xtransition_time_across_10_players = 11x51 + 11x60sec= 561 + 660 = 1221sec = 20.35mins (approximately)

SEE THE IMPROVEMENT from 101 mins to 20.35 mins (BETTER APPROACH)

3) PARALLEL - lets say organizers get some extra funds and thus decided to invite two professional champion player (both equally capable) and divided the set of same 10 players (challengers) in two group of 5 each and assigned them to two champion i.e. one group each. Now the event is progressing in parallel in these two sets i.e. at least two players (one in each group) are playing against the two professional players in their respective group.

However within the group the professional player with take one player at a time (i.e. sequentially) so without any calculation you can easily deduce that whole event will approximately complete in 101/2=50.5mins to complete

SEE THE IMPROVEMENT from 101 mins to 50.5 mins (GOOD APPROACH)

4) CONCURRENT + PARALLEL - In above scenario, lets say that the two champion player will play concurrently (read 2nd point) with the 5 players in their respective groups so now games across groups are running in parallel but within group they are running concurrently.

So the games in one group will approximately complete in 11xtime_per_turn_by_player_&_champion + 11xtransition_time_across_5_players = 11x51 + 11x30 = 600 + 330 = 930sec = 15.5mins (approximately)

So the whole event (involving two such parallel running group) will approximately complete in 15.5mins

SEE THE IMPROVEMENT from 101 mins to 15.5 mins (BEST APPROACH)

NOTE: in above scenario if you replace 10 players with 10 similar jobs and two professional player with a two CPU cores then again the following ordering will remain true:

SERIAL > PARALLEL > CONCURRENT > CONCURRENT+PARALLEL

(NOTE: this order might change for other scenarios as this ordering highly depends on inter-dependency of jobs, communication needs b/w jobs and transition overhead b/w jobs)