They can be more ornate than you'd expect, however: for a start, you can run multiple app-specific tasks in parallel, such as telling Chrome to search YouTube, IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes the moment you type in a movie keyword.

ENGADGET

Scala programs apportion parallel computing tasks among everything from the different computing cores on a single chip, to the different servers in a data center, to different data centers.

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Weinberger tackled those problems by designing his chip from scratch, finding ways to split out parts of laborious signal-processing tasks and handle them in parallel.

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Recently, parallel architectures utilized by computer graphics firms like Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia actually do run certain tasks at the same time, using multiple buses (communications pathways) that lead to separate computing engines.

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