Inter-Process Communication is the mechanism for processes to communicate and to synchronize their actions or to allow processes to exchange information. There are numerous reasons for providing an environment or situation which allows process co-operation:
Information sharing: Since some users may be interested in the same piece of information (for example, a shared file), you must provide a situation for allowing concurrent access to that information.
Computation speedup: If you want a particular work to run fast, you must break it into sub-tasks where each of them will get executed in parallel with the other tasks. Note that such a speed-up can be attained only when the computer has compound or various processing elements like CPUs or I/O channels.
Modularity: You may want to build the system in a modular way by dividing the system functions into split processes or threads.
Convenience: Even a single user may work on many tasks at a time. For example, a user may be editing, formatting, printing, and compiling in parallel.
