The following is a Guest Post by Andrew Price:
Granularity is a hard word to explain. The word ‘granular’ is used to describe something that is made up of smaller elements, and ‘granularity’ is how small or large those elements are. If the elements are small, we call it ‘fine-grained’, and if the elements are large we call it ‘coarse-grained’. It is a term we use in economics, computer science, geology, and likely many other fields. For example, in computer science, an algorithm is fine-grained if it is divided into many small steps, and coarse-grained if it is divided into few large steps.