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)