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Granular Dynamics
Granularity (also called graininess), the condition of existing in granules or grains, refers to the extent to which a material or system is composed of distinguishable pieces. It can either refer to the extent to which a larger entity is subdivided, or the extent to which groups of smaller indistinguishable entities have joined together to become larger distinguishable entities. Precision and ambiguity Coarse-grained materials or systems have fewer, larger discrete components than fine-grained materials or systems. * A coarse-grained description of a system regards large subcomponents. * A fine-grained description regards smaller components of which the larger ones are composed. The concepts granularity, coarseness, and fineness are relative; and are used when comparing systems or descriptions of systems. An example of increasingly fine granularity: a list of nations in the United Nations, a list of all states/provinces in those nations, a list of all cities in those states ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Granular Material
A granular material is a conglomeration of discrete solid, macroscopic particles characterized by a loss of energy whenever the particles interact (the most common example would be friction when grains collide). The constituents that compose granular material are large enough such that they are not subject to thermal motion fluctuations. Thus, the lower size limit for grains in granular material is about 1 μm. On the upper size limit, the physics of granular materials may be applied to ice floes where the individual grains are icebergs and to asteroid belts of the Solar System with individual grains being asteroids. Some examples of granular materials are snow, nuts, coal, sand, rice, coffee, corn flakes, fertilizer, and bearing balls. Research into granular materials is thus directly applicable and goes back at least to Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, whose law of friction was originally stated for granular materials. Granular materials are commercially important in applicat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Data Path Unit
Reconfigurable computing is a computer architecture combining some of the flexibility of software with the high performance of hardware by processing with very flexible high speed computing fabrics like field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The principal difference when compared to using ordinary microprocessors is the ability to make substantial changes to the datapath itself in addition to the control flow. On the other hand, the main difference from custom hardware, i.e. application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) is the possibility to adapt the hardware during runtime by "loading" a new circuit on the reconfigurable fabric. History The concept of reconfigurable computing has existed since the 1960s, when Gerald Estrin's paper proposed the concept of a computer made of a standard processor and an array of "reconfigurable" hardware. The main processor would control the behavior of the reconfigurable hardware. The latter would then be tailored to perform a specific task, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Granularity (parallel Computing)
In parallel computing, granularity (or grain size) of a task is a measure of the amount of work (or computation) which is performed by that task. Another definition of granularity takes into account the communication overhead between multiple processors or processing elements. It defines granularity as the ratio of computation time to communication time, wherein, computation time is the time required to perform the computation of a task and communication time is the time required to exchange data between processors. . If T_\mathrm is the computation time and T_\mathrm denotes the communication time, then the Granularity G of a task can be calculated as: ::G=\frac Granularity is usually measured in terms of the number of instructions executed in a particular task. Alternately, granularity can also be specified in terms of the execution time of a program, combining the computation time and communication time. Types of parallelism Depending on the amount of work which is performed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
