communicate with each other via that memory.The most common form of such system
is known as a symmetric multiprocessor (SMP), which we examine in Section 17.2. In
an SMP, multiple processors share a single memory or pool of memory by means of a
shared bus or other interconnection mechanism; a distinguishing feature is that the
memory access time to any region of memory is approximately the same for each
processor.A more recent development is the nonuniform memory access (NUMA) organization,
which is described in Section 17.5.As the name suggests, the memory access
time to different regions of memory may differ for a NUMA processor.