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Parallel computing is a form of computation in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously, operating on the principle that large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which are then solved concurrently. There are several different forms of parallel computing: bit-level-, instruction-level-, data-, and task parallelism. As power consumption by computers has become a concern in recent years, parallel computing has become the dominant paradigm in computer architecture, mainly in the form of multicore processors. Parallel computers can be roughly classified according to the level at which the hardware supports parallelism—with multi-core and multi-processor computers having multiple processing elements within a single machine, while clusters, MPPs, and grids use multiple computers to work on the same task. Parallel computer programs are more difficult to write than sequential ones, because concurrency introduces several new classes of potential software bugs, of which race conditions are the most common. Communication and synchronization between the different subtasks are typically one of the greatest obstacles to getting good parallel program performance. The speed-up of a program as a result of parallelization is given by Amdahl's law. (more...)

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March 18: Flag Day in Aruba (1976)

• 1229 – Sixth Crusade: Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II crowned himself King of Jerusalem, although his wife Queen Yolande of Jerusalem had died, leaving their infant son Conrad as the rightful heir.
• 1871 – French President Adolphe Thiers ordered the evacuation of Paris after an uprising broke out as the result of France's defeat in the Franco–Prussian War, leading to the establishment of the Paris Commune government.
• 1892 – Canadian Governor General Frederick Stanley of Preston pledged to donate what would become the Stanley Cup (1893 version pictured), today the oldest professional sports trophy in North America, as an award for Canada's top-ranking amateur ice hockey club.
• 1915 – World War I: In one of the largest naval battles in the Gallipoli Campaign, a joint British and French operation to capture Constantinople, the defences of the Ottoman Empire sunk three Allied battleships and severely damaged three others.
• 1965 – Cosmonaut Alexey Leonov donned a space suit and ventured outside the Voskhod 2 spacecraft, becoming the first person to walk in space.

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