Disclosed is a method of determining concurrency factors for an application running on a parallel processor. Also disclosed is a system for implementing the method. In an embodiment, the method includes running at least a portion of the kernel as sequences of mini-kernels, each mini-kernel including a number of concurrently executing workgroups. The number of concurrently executing workgroups is defined as a concurrency factor of the mini-kernel. A performance measure is determined for each sequence of mini-kernels. From the sequences, a particular sequence is chosen that achieves a desired performance of the kernel, based on the performance measures. The kernel is executed with the particular sequence.