coarse grain

1 definition found

coarse grain - Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (26 May 2007) :

  granularity
  coarse grain
  fine grain
  grain
  
     <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)