In simple terms, the computing process is defined as an instance of a software program to execute a set of predefined activities to generate the result as the output. In the hardware of the computers, CPU is the core component of the process in which Control Unit (CU) and ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit) are the fundamentals to execute.

Performance is the key success indicator of the process. There are two aspects to a performance improvement scheme. The first is to execute multiples of a single job instance. This refers to concurrency and parallelism. However, both objectives are the same, and they have quite distinct concepts.

The second aspect is the multiple folds at the machine level. It is a foundation for the scaling concepts of scale up and scale out. We will discuss scalability in detail at the end of this chapter.