Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Task (computing)
Summary
In computing, a task is a unit of execution or a unit of work. The term is ambiguous; precise alternative terms include process, light-weight process, thread (for execution), step, request, or query (for work). In the adjacent diagram, there are queues of incoming work to do and outgoing completed work, and a thread pool of threads to perform this work. Either the work units themselves or the threads that perform the work can be referred to as "tasks", and these can be referred to respectively as requests/responses/threads, incoming tasks/completed tasks/threads (as illustrated), or requests/responses/tasks.
In the sense of "unit of execution", in some operating systems, a task is synonymous with a process, and in others with a thread. In non-interactive execution (batch processing), a task is a unit of execution within a job, with the task itself typically a process. The term "multitasking" primarily refers to the processing sense – multiple tasks executing at the same time – but has nuances of the work sense of multiple tasks being performed at the same time.
In the sense of "unit of work", in a job (meaning "one-off piece of work") a task can correspond to a single step (the step itself, not the execution thereof), while in batch processing individual tasks can correspond to a single step of processing a single item in a batch, or to a single step of processing all items in the batch. In online systems, tasks most commonly correspond to a single request (in request–response architectures) or a query (in information retrieval), either a single stage of handling, or the whole system-wide handling.
In the Java programming language, these two concepts (unit of work and unit of execution) are conflated when working directly with threads, but clearly distinguished in the Executors framework:
When you work directly with threads, a Thread serves as both a unit of work and the mechanism for executing it. In the executor framework, the unit of work and the execution mechanism are separate.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.