Serial port Windows. Serial port In computing, a serial port is a serial communication interface through which information transfers in or out one bit at a time (in contrast to a parallel port). Throughout most of the history of personal computers, data was transferred through serial ports to devices such as modems, terminals, and various peripherals. While such interfaces as Ethernet, FireWire, and USB all send data as a serial stream, the term "serial port" usually identifies hardware more or less compliant to the RS-232 standard, intended to interface with a modem or with a similar communication device. Modern computers without serial
Embarrassingly parallel are thus well suited to large, Internet-based distributed platforms such as BOINC, and do not suffer from parallel slowdown. The opposite of embarrassingly parallel problems are inherently serial problems, which cannot be parallelized at all. A common example of an embarrassingly parallel problem is 3D video rendering handled by a graphics processing unit, where each frame (forward method) or pixel (ray tracing method) can be handled with no interdependency. Password cracking is another embarrassingly parallel task that is easily distributed on central processing units, CPU cores, or clusters. "Embarrassingly" is used here in the same sense as in the phrase