 | | One of those capabilities is a computing system's ability to perform multitasking. Today, it's frequently useful to look at our program (our very big task) as a collection of subtasks. For instance, if our program is a marine navigation system, we could launch separate tasks to perform each sounding and maintain other tasks that calculate relative depth, correlate coordinates with depth measurements, and display charts on a screen. If we can get the computer to execute some of these subtasks at the same time, with no change in our program's results, our overall task will continue to get as much processing as it needs, but it will complete in a shorter period of time. On some systems, the execution of subtasks will be interleaved on a single processor; on others, they can run in parallel. Either way, we'll see a performance boost. | |
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