Synchronization (computer science)

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In computer science, especially parallel computing, synchronization means the coordination of simultaneous threads or processes to complete a task in order to get correct runtime order and avoid unexpected race conditions.

There are many types of synchronization:

• barrier
• lock/semaphore
• non-blocking synchronization
• synchronous communication operations (see: Comparison of synchronous and asynchronous signalling)

On the other hand, file synchronization is the communication between two computers (using a sync cable - see Mini-USB).

[edit] See also

• Concurrent computing
• Mutual exclusion

	Topics in Parallel Computing	v • d • e
General High-performance computing Parallelism Data parallelism • Task parallelism Theory Speedup • Amdahl's law • Flynn's Taxonomy • Cost efficiency • Gustafson's Law • Karp-Flatt Metric Elements Process • Thread • Fiber • Parallel Random Access Machine Coordination Multiprocessing • Multithreading •Multitasking • Memory coherency • Cache coherency • Barrier • Synchronization • Distributed computing • Grid computing Programming Programming model • Implicit parallelism • Explicit parallelism Hardware Computer cluster • Beowulf • Symmetric multiprocessing • Non-Uniform Memory Access • Cache only memory architecture • Asymmetric multiprocessing • Simultaneous multithreading • Shared memory • Distributed memory • Massively parallel processing • Superscalar processing • Vector processing • Supercomputer Software Distributed shared memory • Application checkpointing APIs Pthreads • OpenMP • Message Passing Interface (MPI) Problems Embarrassingly parallel • Grand Challenge