granularity

jargon, parallel The size of the units of code under

consideration in some context. The term generally refers to

the level of detail at which code is considered, e.g. "You can

specify the granularity for this profiling tool".

The most common computing use is in parallelism where "fine

grain parallelism" means individual tasks are relatively small

in terms of code size and execution time, "coarse grain" is

the opposite. You talk about the "granularity" of the

parallelism.

The smaller the granularity, the greater the potential for

parallelism and hence speed-up but the greater the overheads

of synchronisation and communication.

(1997-05-08)