granular

[gran-yuh-ler] /ˈgræn yə lər/
adjective
1.
of the nature of granules; grainy.
2.
composed of or bearing granules or grains.
3.
showing a granulated structure.
Origin
1785-95; granule + -ar1
Related forms
granularity, noun
granularly, adverb
multigranular, adjective
nongranular, adjective
subgranular, adjective
subgranularly, adverb
subgranularity, noun
ungranular, adjective
Examples from the web for granularity
  • The new monitoring stations should allow such granularity.
  • With a three point system including corporatist you get this level of granularity.
  • Abstraction and granularity is mixed with intelligence.
  • These ontologies cover unrelated or overlapping domains, at different levels of detail and granularity.
  • Data locality, granularity, and task scheduling for load balancing are non-issues.
British Dictionary definitions for granularity

granularity

/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

granular

/ˈɡrænjʊlə/
adjective
1.
of, like, containing, or resembling a granule or granules
2.
having a grainy or granulated surface
Derived Forms
granularly, adverb
Word Origin and History for granularity

granular

adj.

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

granularity in Medicine

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

  1. Composed or appearing to be composed of granules or grains.

  2. Relating to or containing particles having a strong affinity for nuclear stains, as in certain bacteria.

granularity in Technology

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)