What is Parallel Processing or Parallelization?

Parallel processing is a way of processing data in a parallel or side-by-side format on a blockchain network (or via other types of computer network infrastructure) in order to execute multiple calculations simultaneously. Parallel processing is often used in sharding and other methods to increase transaction processing times and scalability on a computer network. Parallelization is another name for parallel processing, and is becoming an increasingly dominant paradigm for computer architecture design. Parallelization is often performed using a multi-core processing system that makes use of several core processor units at the same time to increase system performance.