Parallelism implies concurrency but not the other way round right?

Question

I often read that parallelism and concurrency are different things. Very often the answerers/commenters go as far as writing that they're two entirely different things. Yet in my view they're related but I'd like some clarification on that.

For example if I'm on a multi-core CPU and manage to divide the computation into x smaller computation (say using fork/join) each running in its own thread, I'll have a program that is both doing parallel computation (because supposedly at any point in time several threads are going to run on several cores) and being concurrent right?

While if I'm simply using, say, Java and dealing with UI events and repaints on the Event Dispatch Thread plus running the only thread I created myself, I'll have a program that is concurrent (EDT + GC thread + my main thread etc.) but not parallel.

I'd like to know if I'm getting this right and if parallelism (on a "single but multi-cores" system) always implies concurrency or not?

Also, are multi-threaded programs running on multi-cores CPU but where the different threads are doing totally different computation considered to be using "parallelism"?

Answer 1

According to Wikipedia:

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 ("in parallel").

That is, parallelism always implies concurrency.

Also, are multi-threaded programs running on multi-cores CPU but where the different threads are doing totally different computation considered to be using "parallelism"?

No. The essence of parallelism is that a large problem is divided into smaller ones so that the smaller pieces can be solved concurrently. The pieces are mutually independent (to some degree at least), but they're still part of the larger problem, which is now being solved in parallel.

The essence of concurrency is that a number of threads (or processes, or computers) are doing something simultaneously, possibly (but not necessarily) interacting in some ways. Wikipedia again:

Concurrency is a property of systems in which several computations are executing simultaneously, and potentially interacting with each other.

Answer 2

Code can be concurrent, but not parallel.

Imagine multiple threads running on single core machine. This single core machine will only process one thread at the time, so there will be no parallelism of operations. But for each thread, thanks to how OS handles multiple threads, then each thread needs to assume all other threads are running at the same time.

Answer 3

Parallelism simply means doing many tasks simultaneously; on the other hand concurrency is the ability of the kernel to perform many tasks by constantly switching among many processes.

In order to achieve parallelism it is important that system should have many cores only then parallelism can be achieved efficiently. And there is lot of hit on performance and lot of overhead is incurred if parallelism is tried on a single core machine.

For example, earlier system had only one core and CPU schedulers would give an illusion of parallelism by constantly switching between processes allowing each process to make progress.