This document provides an overview of parallel and distributed processing. It begins by introducing different types of parallelism including task, data, and pipelining parallelism. It then discusses domain decomposition and data parallelism using the example of processing an image by averaging pixel values. Other topics covered include classification of parallel machines, uses of parallelism such as supercomputing, and Flynn's taxonomy for classifying computers based on the number of instruction and data streams. The document aims to provide motivation and background on parallel processing concepts.