Granularity

[gran-yuh-ler] /ˈgræn yə lər/

adjective
1.
of the nature of ; grainy.
2.
composed of or bearing granules or .
3.
showing a granulated structure.
4.
highly detailed; having many small and distinct parts:
data analysis on a granular level.
/ˌɡrænjʊˈlærɪtɪ/
noun
1.
the state or quality of being grainy or granular
2.
the state or quality of being composed of many individual pieces or elements
/ˈɡrænjʊlə/
adjective
1.
of, like, containing, or resembling a granule or granules
2.
having a grainy or granulated surface
adj.

1794, from Late Latin granulum “granule,” diminutive of Latin granum “grain, seed” (see corn (n.1)) + -ar. Replaced granulous (late 14c.). Related: Granularity.

granular gran·u·lar (grān’yə-lər)
adj.

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)