L-P

LAN

Local Area Network; a network employed within a single administrative domain such as a laboratory or office complex, connecting PCs and workstations together to file servers, printers and other peripherals, and to the Internet. Low cost LAN technology has been adopted to provide Beowulf-class systems with inexpensive moderate bandwidth interconnect

LED

Light Emitting Diode

Linux

the dominant Unix-like cross-platform operating system developed by a broad international community enabled by an open source code framework

Mbps

1 million bits per second data transfer rate or bandwidth

Mega

prefix meaning 1 million or in the case of storage 2²⁰

message passing

An approach to parallelism based on communicating data between processes running (usually) on separate computers.

metadata

Used in the context of file systems, this is the information describing the file, including owner, permissions, and location of data

MPI

message passing interface, a community derived logical standard for the transfer of program messages between separate concurrent processes

MPP

Massively Parallel Processors

MTBF

Mean Time Between Failure

Myricom

vendor, distributor, and developer of the Myrinet network for commodity clusters

network

the combination of communication channels, switches, and interface controllers that transfer digital messages between Beowulf cluster nodes

NIC

network interface controller; usually the combination of hardware and software that matches the network transport layer to the computer node of a cluster

NOW

network or workstations, and early influential commodity cluster project at UC Berkeley

PC

See Personal Computer or PC.

PCI

the dominant external interface standard for PCs and workstations to support I/O controllers including NICs

Personal Computer or PC

mass market microprocessor based computer employed by both commercial and consumer users for everything from games to spreadsheets and internet browsers; emphasizing performance/cost for maximum market share, these nodes are the basis for low cost Beowulf-class clusters

PVFS

Parallel virtual file system

PVM

Parallel Virtual Machine, a library of functions supporting an advanced message-passing semantics