The degree of parallelism (DOP) is a metric which indicates how many
operations
Operation or Operations may refer to:
Arts, entertainment and media
* ''Operation'' (game), a battery-operated board game that challenges dexterity
* Operation (music), a term used in musical set theory
* ''Operations'' (magazine), Multi-Man ...
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 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
{{Comp-sci-stub