[co-operative vs. pre-emptive]
At different levels, distributed computing or parallel processing are related topics.
developerWorks hosts a write-up of some of this material [L1 ]. While Jon Stokes' "Introduction to Multithreading, Superthreading and Hyperthreading" [L2 ] claims to be mostly about (rather specific) hardware, in fact its readability and confident accuracy recommend it for those in search of a more general introduction to operating system-level concurrency.