Hi there,

I'm studying for my final exams in my CS major on the subject distributed systems and operating systems.

I'm in the need for a good definition for the terms task, process and threads. So far I'm confident that a process is the representation of running (or suspended, but initiated) program with its own memory, program counter, registers, stack, etc (process control block). Processes can run threads which share memory, so that communication via shared memory is possible in contrast to processes which have to communicate via IPC.

But what's the difference between tasks and process. I often read that they're interchangable and that the term task isn't used anymore. Is that really true?