Physics and Parallelism

Abstract

Many of the methods employed to solve problems, both in physics and in other branches of science, lend themselves naturally to parallelization. This statement, although it may seem obvious to many readers, needs some clarification. To what extent is this statement true and are there problems which are inherently serial? We may indeed suspect that there are some problems which are not susceptible to parallelization. We have already encountered the exponential function, which we identified as being serial. It is also possible that some problems are amenable to parallelization but that it is not optimal to solve them in such a way.