All the processors or cores have access to the same global address space.
Most of the main stream commodity based x86 desktops and laptops have
CPUs with multiple cores.
Relatively easy to program applications, for example, with OpenMP.
Performance scalability with the number of cores may be low due to CPU-RAM traffic increase, high latency of RAM, and maintaining of the cache coherency.
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The CPUs have access only to their own memory space.
Data is exchanged via messages passed over the network.
Message passing function calls have to be used in a code development,
for example, MPI.
Good performance scalability may be achieved with the number of nodes increase.
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