Simultaneous processing with two or more processors in one computer or two or more computers processing together. When two or more computers are used, they are tied together with a high-speed channel and share the general workload between them. If one fails, the other takes over. Multiprocessing is also accomplished in special-purpose computers, such as vector processors, which provide concurrent processing on sets of data.
Concurrent Instruction Processing
All computers perform simultaneous functions, such as executing instructions while reading from an input device and writing to an output device. CPUs can also execute multiple instructions simultaneously from a single stream of instructions (see
pipeline processing). However, multiprocessing refers specifically to the concurrent execution of two or more independent streams of instructions. See
parallel processing,
SMP,
MPP,
CMP,
bus mastering and
fault tolerant.