USB It has largely replaced interfaces such as serial ports and parallel ports, and has become commonplace on a wide range of devices. USB connectors have been increasingly replacing other types for battery chargers of portable devices. This section is intended to allow fast identification of USB receptacles (sockets) on equipment. Further diagrams and discussion of plugs and receptacles can be found in USB (Physical) § Connectors. The Universal Serial Bus was developed to simplify and improve the interface between personal computers and peripheral devices, when compared with previously existing standard or ad-hoc proprietary interfaces. From the computer user's perspective, the
Parallel database Parallel database A parallel database system seeks to improve performance through parallelization of various operations, such as loading data, building indexes and evaluating queries. Although data may be stored in a distributed fashion, the distribution is governed solely by performance considerations. Parallel databases improve processing and input/output speeds by using multiple CPUs and disks in parallel. Centralized and client–server database systems are not powerful enough to handle such applications. In parallel processing, many operations are performed simultaneously, as opposed to serial processing, in which the computational steps are performed sequentially. Parallel databases can be roughly divided into two groups, the