The degree of parallelism (DOP) is a metric which indicates how many
operations can be or are being simultaneously executed by a computer. It is used as an indicator of the complexity of
algorithm
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...
s, and is especially useful for describing the performance of
parallel programs and
multi-processor
Multiprocessing is the use of two or more central processing units (CPUs) within a single computer system. The term also refers to the ability of a system to support more than one processor or the ability to allocate tasks between them. There ar ...
systems.
A program running on a parallel computer may utilize different numbers of processors at different times. For each time period, the number of processors used to execute a program is defined as the degree of parallelism. The plot of the DOP as a function of time for a given program is called the parallelism profile.
See also
*
Optical Multi-Tree with Shuffle Exchange
References
Instruction processing
Parallel computing
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