An Airbus has seven computer systems running in parallel, so as to provide enough redundancy to cope with computer breakdowns.

ECONOMIST: Drive by wire

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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Huang argues this is a natural for Nvidia, whose graphics business is built on building chips able to do the parallel computing work that makes computer graphics pop.

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Using Linux-based servers working in parallel, they generate a computer model of how a drill bit must twist and turn to hit one or more formations as much as 9, 000 meters below the sea floor.

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Maybe it was because the list came to life over a Thai dinner in York (UK) but the first suggestion is distinctly non-parallel consider buying a faster computer.

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According to Forrester, today's computers use more technologies common to the Whirlwind than any other computer of its time, including parallel data transmission.

CNN: Machines on a mission

In theory, this uncertainty should allow a full-sized quantum computer to do lots of calculations in parallel, and thus to solve problems that would take forever or, at least, several billion years on a traditional machine.

ECONOMIST: Quantum computing

Unfortunately, it involved building an artificially intelligent observer and, even more problematically, that observer had to be a quantum computer, a device that exploits quantum mechanics to do huge numbers of calculations in parallel.

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Google, by its configuration of hundreds of thousands of commodity servers into a massive, parallel, virtual supercomputer used for search, has worked out, by intent or accident, the enterprise computer platform of the future.

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