Is dependency graph and its analysis by any chance related to data flow analysis in compiler? If so, how are they related?

@suninhouse You're right that they seem to be highly overlapping ideas! My impression was that that happens at the register level, though; this seems to be at a higher level, with the named variables that we work with conceptually.

Understanding dependencies when writing parallel programs is extremely important because dependencies are the root cause of sequential execution. That is, the number of dependencies in a program and the program's speedup are inversely related. The more dependencies in a program, the more sequential execution required, and thus by Amdahl's Law our speedup saturates.