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Pipelining

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Pipelining [1] is a parallel processing strategy in whichan operation or a computation is partitioned into disjoint stages. Thestages must be executed in a particular order (could be a partial order)for the operation or computation to complete successfully. Each stageis implemented as a component which could be a hardware device or asoftware thread. When a stage completes, it becomes available to do otherwork. Parallelism results from the execution of a sequence of operations orcomputations so that at any given time several components of the sequenceare under execution and each one of these is at a different stage of the pipeline.

Pipelining is pervasive in today’s machines. Processor control units and arithmetic units are typically pipelined. Also, programs take advantage of pipelined parallelism by partitioning computations into stages.

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Bibliography

  1. Kogge PM (1981) The Architecture of Pipelined Computers. Hemisphere Publishing Corporation, New York

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© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Padua, D. (2011). Pipelining. In: Padua, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09766-4_335

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