The complexity of an object; whether it consists of few or many discrete operations or data items
The breaking down of information to a minimum size to present an idea clearly within the environment that is presented H
the size of the smallest unit which can be independently locked A database may apply locks at the database level, the relation level, the tuple level, or on the value of a single attribute within a tuple
The degree to which a system contains separate components Systems with greater granularity are more flexible
A term often used in parallel processing to indicate independent processes that could be distributed to multiple CPUs Fine granularity is illustrated by execution of statements or small loop iterations as separate processes; coarse granularity involves subroutines or sets of subroutines as separate processes The more processes, the "finer" the granularity and the more overhead required to keep track of them Granularity can also be related to the temporal duration of a "task" at work It is not only the number of processes but also how much work each process does, relative to the time of synchronization, that determines the overhead and reduces speedup figures
(n ) The size of operations done by a process between communications events A fine grained process may perform only a few arithmetic operations between processing one message and the next, whereas a coarse grained process may perform millions See also computation-to-communication ratio
Measure of the work done between synchronization points Fine-grained applications focus on execution at the instruction level of a program Such applications are load balanced but suffer from a low computation/communication ratio Coarse-grained applications focus on execution at the program level where multiple programs may be executed in parallel
The size of the operations done by a process between communication events A ``fine-grained'' process may perform only a few arithmetic operations between processing one message and the next, while a ``coarse-grained'' process may perform millions [Wil93]
The relative fineness or coarseness by which a mechanism can be adjusted The phrase "the granularity of a single user" means the access control mechanism can be adjusted to include or exclude any single user
Fineness, or atomic density of data; e g , fine granularity might be duration in seconds, coarse granularity in days Fine granularity is high atomic density, coarse is low Detailed, operational data is fine; summary is coarse