, a paradigm in computing which has multiple tasks running simultaneously, might contain what is known as an embarrassingly parallel workload or problem. An embarrassingly parallel task can be considered a trivial case - little or no manipulation is needed to separate the problem into a number of parallel tasks. This is often the case where there is little or no dependency or need for communication between those parallel tasks, or for results between them. Thus, these are different from distributed computing problems that need communication between tasks, especially communication of intermediate results. They are easy to perform on server farms which lack the special infrastructure used in a true supercomputer cluster. They are thus well suited to large, Internet-based distributed platforms such as BOINC, and do not suffer from parallel slowdown. The opposite of embarrassingly parallel problems are inherently serial problems, which cannot be parallelized at all. A common example of an embarrassingly parallel problem is 3D video rendering handled by a graphics processing unit, where each frame or pixel can be handled with no interdependency. Some forms of password cracking are another embarrassingly parallel task that is easily distributed on central processing units, CPU cores, or clusters.
Etymology
"Embarrassingly" is used here in the same sense as in the phrase "an embarrassment of riches", meaning an overabundance—here referring to parallelization problems which are "embarrassingly easy". The term may also imply embarrassment on the part of developers or compilers: "Because so many important problems remain unsolved mainly due to their intrinsic computational complexity, it would be embarrassing not to develop parallel implementations of polynomial homotopy continuation methods." The term is first found in the literature in a 1986 book on multiprocessors by MATLAB's creator Cleve Moler, who claims to have invented the term. An alternative term, pleasingly parallel, has gained some use, perhaps to avoid the negative connotations of embarrassment in favor of a positive reflection on the parallelizability of the problems: "Of course, there is nothing embarrassing about these programs at all."
Examples
Some examples of embarrassingly parallel problems include:
In R – The Simple Network of Workstations package implements a simple mechanism for using a set of workstations or a Beowulf cluster for embarrassingly parallel computations.
