Appendix A: Glossary of Terms


B-I

Beowulf-class system

commodity cluster employing personal computers or low-cost SMP servers to achieve excellent price-performance initially developed by the Beowulf project at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

bit

the fundamental unit of information representing a two-state value; a digital circuit capable of storing a two-state value

BLAS

basic linear algebra subroutines

bps

bits per second, a unit measure of data transfer rate

byte

a commonly addressed quantity of digital information storage of eight bits reflecting one of 256 distinct values

cluster

in the general sense, any interconnected ensemble of computers capable of independent operation but employed to service a common workload

commodity cluster

a cluster of commercial computing nodes integrated with a commercial system area network

constellation

a cluster of large DSM, SMP, or MPP computing nodes incorporating more microprocessors per node than there are nodes in the system

COW

cluster of workstations; an early project at the University of Wisconsin

DSM

distributed shared memory multiprocessor, tightly coupled cache coherent multiprocessor with non-uniform memory access

EPIC

Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing

Ethernet

the first widely used and truly ubiquitous local area network operating at 10 Mbps

Fast Ethernet

a cost effective local area network based on the original Ethernet protocol that has become very popular with low end Beowulf-class systems; providing 100 Mbps

Gigabit Ethernet

a LAN that is the successor of Fast Ethernet providing peak bandwidth of 1 Gbps.

GNU

a project resulting in a number of open source and free software tools including the GNU C compiler and Emacs

GPL

GNU Public License; a legal framework protecting open source software

HDF

Hierarchical data format, both a file format and high level interface for I/O access in both sequential and parallel applications

HPL

High Performance Linpack

Infiniband

a system-area network designed to provide high performance and to provide a path for rapid improvement in network bandwidth.

ISA

Instruction Set Architecture




Beowulf Cluster Computing With Linux 2003
Beowulf Cluster Computing With Linux 2003
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2005
Pages: 198

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