This document provides an introduction to cloud computing and parallel/distributed processing through a lecture on the topic. It discusses web-scale problems involving large amounts of data, the use of large data centers to process this data, and different computing models like utility computing. It also introduces concepts like virtualization, MapReduce, and designing applications around patterns for parallelism. The overall goal of the lecture is to define cloud computing and discuss how techniques like MapReduce can help manage distributed and parallel processing of large datasets in the cloud.