Editing Process (computing) (section)

==Inter-process communication==
{{Main|Inter-process communication}}

When processes need to communicate with each other they must share parts of their [[address space]]s or use other forms of inter-process communication (IPC).
For instance in a [[Shell (computing)|shell]] [[Pipeline (computing)|pipeline]], the output of the first process needs to pass to the second one, and so on. Another example is a task that has been decomposed into cooperating but partially independent processes which can run simultaneously (i.e., using concurrency, or true parallelism – the latter model is a particular case of concurrent execution and is feasible whenever multiple CPU cores are available for the processes that are ready to run).

It is even possible for two or more processes to be running on different machines that may run different operating system (OS), therefore some mechanisms for communication and synchronization (called [[communications protocol]]s for distributed computing) are needed (e.g., the [[Message Passing Interface]] {MPI}).