---
title: "Degree of parallelism"
chunk: 1/1
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degree_of_parallelism"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T11:32:41.491362+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

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 algorithms, 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 ==