granularity

granularity

The degree of modularity of a system. More granularity implies more flexibility in customizing a system, because there are more, smaller increments (granules) from which to choose.

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granularity [‚gran·yə′lar·əd·ē]

(graphic arts)

The distribution of grains in a portion of photographic material that has been uniformly exposed and processed.

(petrology)

The feature of rock texture relating to the size of the constituent grains or crystals.

(systems engineering)

The degree to which a system can be broken down into separate components, making it customizable and flexible.

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(jargon, parallel)

granularity - 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.