A significant part of the material of this glossary was adapted from material originally written by Gregory V. Wilson which appeared as "A Glossary of Parallel Computing Terminology" (IEEE Parallel & Distributed Technology, February 1993), and is being re-printed in the same author's "Practical Parallel Programming" (MIT Press, 1995). Several people have contributed additions to this glossary, especially Jack Dongarra, Geoffrey Fox and many of my colleagues at Edinburgh and Syracuse.
Original version is from NPAC at <URL:http://nhse.npac.syr.edu/hpccgloss/>
Original author: Ken Hawick, khawick@cs.adelaide.edu.auSee also the index of all letters and the full list of entries (very large)
Sections: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
acyclic graph (n.) a graph without any cycles.
adaptive (adj.) Taking available information into account. For example, an adaptive mesh-generating algorithm generates a finer resolution mesh near to discontinuities such as boundaries and corners. An adaptive routing algorithm may send identical messages in different directions at different times depending on the local density information it has on message traffic. See also oblivious
address generation (n.) a cycle during execution of an instruction in which an effective address is calculated by means of indexing or indirect addressing.
address mask (n.) in internet communications, a 32 bit long mask used to select an IP address for subnet addressing. The mask selects the network portion of the IP address and one or more bits of the local LAN address.
address space (n.) A region of a computer's total memory within which addresses are contiguous and may refer to one another directly. A shared memory computer has only one user-visible address space; a disjoint memory computer can have several.
address translation (n.) in networking, the process of converting external addresses into standardized network addresses and vice versa. This facilitates the interconnection of multiple networks which each have their own address plan.
adjacency matrix (n.) a Boolean matrix indicating for each pair of vertices I and J whether there is an edge from I to J.
all-pairs shortest-path problem (n.) given a weighted graph, find the shortest path between every pair of vertices.
alpha-beta pruning (n.) an algorithm used to determine the minimax value of a game tree. Alpha-beta algorithm avoids searching subtrees whose evaluation cannot influence the outcome of the search.
Amdahl's Law (n.) A rule first formalised by Gene Amdahl in 1967, which states that if F is the fraction of a calculation that is serial and 1-F the fraction that can be parallelized, then the speedup that can be achieved using P processors is: 1/( F + (1-F)/P) which has a limiting value of 1/F for an infinite number of processors. This no matter how many processors are employed, if a calculation has a 10% serial component, the maximum speedup obtainable is 10.
AMI (n.) alternate mark inversion, a line code used for T1 and E1 lines that has a 12.5% ones density minimum, and the one conditions of the signal alternate between positive and negative polarity.
AND tree (n.) a search tree whose nonterminal nodes are all AND nodes.
AND-parallelism (n.) A form of parallelism exploited by some implementations of parallel logic programming languages, in which the terms in conjunctions are evaluated simultaneously, and parent computations are allowed to proceed only once their immediate children have completed. See also OR-parallelism .
AND/OR tree (n.) a search tree with both AND and OR nonterminal nodes.
ANSI (n.) American National Standards Institute, a United States based organization which develops standards and defines interfaces for telecommunications amongst other things.
antidependence (n.) See dependence.
AppleTalk (n.) Apple Computer's proprietary network suite of protocols.
applicative language a language that performs all computations by applying functions to values.
architecture (n.) The basic plan along which a computer has been constructed. Popular parallel architectures include processor arrays, bus-based multiprocessors (with caches of various sizes and structures) and disjoint memory multicomputers. See also Flynn's taxonomy.
arity (n.) The number of arguments taken by a function. Arity is also sometimes used in place of valence.
ARP (n.) Address resolution protocol under TCP/IP used to dynamically bind a high level IP address to a low-level physical hardware address. ARP is limited to a single physical network that supports hardware broadcasting.
ARPAnet (n.) The US Advanced Research Project Agency network, which was the first large multi-site computer network.
array constant (n.) an array reference within an iterative loop, all of whose subscripts are invariant.
array processor (n.) Any computer designed primarily to perform data parallel calculations on arrays or matrices. The two principle architectures used are the processor array and the vector processor.
artificial intelligence (n.) A class of problems such as pattern recognition, decision making and learning in which humans are clearly very proficient compared with current computers.
associative address (n.) a method whereby access is made to an item whose key matches an access key, as distinct from an access to an item at a specific address in memory. See associative memory.
associative memory (n.)Memory that can be accessed by content rather than by address; content addressable is often used synonymously. An associative memory permits its user to specify part of a pattern or key and retrieve the values associated with that pattern. The tuple space used to implement the generative communication model is an associative memory.
associative processor (n.) a processor array with associative memory.
asynchronous (n.) A method of transmission which does not require a common clock, but separates fields of data by stop and start bits.
asynchronous algorithm (n.) See relaxation method.
asynchronous message passing (n.) See message passing .
asynchronous transfer mode (n.) A broadband cell relay protocol that cuts subscriber data into fixed size packets for transfer across the wide area network.
ATM (n.) See asynchronous transfer mode.
atomic(adj.) Not interruptible. An atomic operation is one that always appears to have been executed as a unit.
attached vector-processor (n.) A specialised processor for vector computations, designed to be connected to a general purpose host processor. The host processor supplies I/O functions, a file system and other aspects of a computing system environment.
automatic vectorization (n.) A compiler that takes code written in a serial language (often Fortran or C) and translates it into vector instructions. The vector instructions may be machine specific or in a source form such as array extensions or as subroutine calls to a vector library. See also compiler optimization.
auxiliary memory (n.) Memory that is usually large, in capacity, but slow and inexpensive, often a rotating magnetic or optical memory, whose main function is to store large volumes of data and programs not being actively used by the processors.
AVL tree (n.) binary tree having the property that for any node in the tree, the difference in height between the left and right subtrees of that node is no more than 1.