What is SIMD

In this chapter, basic concepts about programming models and computer architectures are introduced to provide context about the major developments in both topics. Differences between multicore and accelerators are also addressed to help the reader understand how the concepts relate and translate between different architectures. Moreover, the authors also present an introduction to programming models focusing on their suitability for different parallelizing strategies and their special features. In this way, the reader is guided to identify which programming models are best suited for specific problems and architectures, according to the computational requirements, as well as those arisen from the data layout.