Thread (computer science)
In computer science, a thread of execution is a fork of a computer program into two or more concurrently running tasks. The implementation of threads and processes differs from one operating system to another, but in most cases, a thread is contained inside a process. Multiple threads can exist within the same process and share resources such as memory, while different processes do not share this data. On a single processor, multithreading generally occurs by time-division multiplexing (as in multitasking): the processor switches between different threads. This context switching generally happens frequently enough that the user perceives the threads or tasks to be running at the same time. On a multiprocessor or multi-core system, the threads or tasks actually do run at the same time, with each processor or core running a particular thread or task.
