[vishnugupta]

Each person on an assembly line operates independent of the rest, there’s no “coordination” as such. A person picks up an incoming object, transforms it and sets it down. For that person, for all practical purposes, the rest of the people working on conveyor belt don’t even exist. I suppose that (not having to coordinate) played a key role in the popularity of conveyor systems. It’s simple enough to debug, address bottlenecks etc.

The closest s/w equivalent I could think of is Unix pipes. When I do “cat foo.csv | sort | uniq -c”, cat/sort/unique aren’t coordinating with each other, each takes the content from stdin, transforms and place it in stdout.

[blackflame]

That's what optimum parallelism is. They are collaborating to process N number as many items at the same time in the most optimum way. They also are coordinating to prevent someone from grabbing the same item or placing the same item in the same place. The conveyor belt itself is a ring buffer.

The assembly line principle can also be applied to the concept of threads. Workers collaborate by handing items off to one or more workers(threads) down the line. Thread pools are just micromanagers constantly reassigning the poor workers, but at least the make a lot of friens collaborating.