With the advent of multi-processor machines researchers have tried to exploit parallelism in other wise serial programs to obtain speed advantage. Various techniches have been developed like vectorization anddependency graph analysis in order to extract parallelizeable segments in a piece of code written for a serialcompiler.

This tutorial will discuss the importance of choosing the grain size for a parallel compiler and trade-offs that it leads to between processing and communication between the processors of a multi-processor machine.