3 ms·

And data parallelism is the type of thing that gets called "embarrassingly parallel" a lot, if the data is independent enough to be easy to partition into lots

• scott_s 15y ago
  Not in my experience. I've seen "embarrassingly parallel" used only to describe when an entire application can be divided up and they never need to communicate again until the end. That is obviously data parallel, but "data parallelism" is also used for finer granularities such as SIMD operators, or parallelizing independent loop iterations. Such things are not considered embarrassingly parallel because the granularity can be fine enough that the synchronization costs can still dominate.
  • dkersten 15y ago
    I don't disagree. That's sort of what I said: often data parallelism is what is called "embarrassingly parallel", but there are certainly plenty of cases of data parallelism which are not embarrassingly parallel. I would say that "embarrassingly parallel" problems are a subset of "data parallel" problems.
    • scott_s 15y ago
      I guess my quibble is that, in my experience, the frequency that problems are "embarrassingly parallel" is so small that I never use the term.
      • dkersten 15y ago
        A fair point. I normally don't use the term myself either, but I hear it thrown around a good bit.