Parallel is always better than Serial... right? NO Well, in the most general case, parallel computing is better than serial computing in terms of speed and throughput. Sometimes, we have to make other considerations too. As a comparison , consider computer networking where serial transmissions are straight-forward and faster than their parallel SCSI counterparts! Some processes are inherently not parallelizable, due to presence of data dependency. (Two bank account withdrawals from different locations which may lead to negative account balance if done simultaneously! Anyway, such a pair of withdrawals with critical section management using semaphores/mutexes conceptually and momentarily reduces to serial execution...) On a lighter note, the process of Sneezing and keeping your eyes open is not parallelizable for example! Before jumping into the concepts and principles of parallelizing a given task, let us go through some interesting set of ( controversial ...