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 especially useful for describing the performance of parallel programs

Parallel programming model

A parallel programming model is a concept that enables the expression of parallel programs which can be compiled and executed. The value of a programming model is usually judged on its generality: how well a range of different problems can be expressed and how well they execute on a range of...

 and multi-processor

Parallel computing

Parallel computing is a form of computation in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously, operating on the principle that large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which are then solved concurrently . There are several different forms of parallel computing: bit-level,...

systems.

A program running on a parallel computer may utilise 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.

maximum degree of parallelism = number of bits in a word X number of words processed in parallel