Understanding Multi Processing

My Mom starts her chores in a unique fashion. She sets off with cooking and while she is in this process she does washing of clothes. And by the time lunch is prepared she does room cleaning and the washing machine makes weird noises. Every natural act which we do has some part of multi processing. Even our internal body mechanism involves multi processing like heart beat, digestion, swallowing etc. These processes dont depend on each other for their functionality.

Multi processing by itself first seems to be a concept only available in Computer Science. But looking into the practical use of it one can confirm that its use in CS is only one of the myraid use of this concept. Assembly line workers work in a pipeline to do the work faster. Courier companies hire many workers to send their work faster and with more reliability. While typing this blog i am reading the daily newspaper and paying my credit card dues. TV veiwing accompanied with reading magazines.

When we say Multi Processing we mean doing multiple tasks at the same time. But in any case this definition is not correct. It just means that when one tasks doesn't require any intervention you serve the next task. For example when you are on the phone and the other person is checking for something you may want to check your mailbox.

This understanding can be extrapolated to understand multiprocessing in Computer Science. When the CPU sees that the current process will involve I/O operation it will then swap the process and get the next process which is waiting for the CPU time. This switching happens in microseconds of time, so for the human eye it seems as if the Processor is doing multitasking.

Concepts in CS are not work of some supernatural being with weird thought process, but of those who utilize the mundane knowledge.