Multiprocessing vs. Multiprogramming

Multiprocessing

Parallelism

The ability of a computational system to simultaneously run two or more programs.

• more than one processor is required (one for each simultaneous execution).

The operating systems of such computational systems support multiprocessing.

Multiprogramming

Concurrency

The illusion created by a computational system of apparently being able to simultaneously run more programs than the number of existing processors.

• The existing processor(s) must be assigned to the different programs in a time-multiplexed way.

The operating systems of such computational systems support multiprogramming.