Why is parallelism important?

There are many situations in which the size of the problems we want to solve increases dramatically. And this is the moment when we have to start talking about more ‘“serious’” real-world applications, such as weather forecasting, scientific research, and artificial intelligence.Remember when we were driving to the supermarket and we mentioned that we could switch drivers for each part of the way? Wouldn't this only end up taking us more time? This was due to context switching – we would have to find a place to park, then switch drivers, then drive the car until the next stop. But why are we talking about this again? Because most of the time, we need a ‘“serious’” real-world application to make it worthwhile working through all the details of parallel programming. One exception could be using parallel programming to accelerate graphics and physics processing in video games; although...