This glossary seeks to explain some of the terms that are common within the HPC community yet may be unfamiliar to the wider public.
- AccessGrid
- The Access Grid® is an ensemble of resources including multimedia large-format displays, presentation and interactive environments, and interfaces to Grid middleware and to visualization environments. [http://www.accessgrid.org/]
- API
- Application Program Interface. A set of calling conventions defining how a service is invoked through a software package.
- DEISA
- Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications.
- C++
- a computer programming language [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C++]
- CCLRC
- Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils [http://www.cclrc.ac.uk/]
- EDIKT
- e-Science Data Integration & Knowledge Transformation
- EPCC
- Formerly Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre [http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/]
- FORTRAN
- FORmula TRANslation. A computer programming language [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran]
- Grid computing
- Using the resources of a many separate computers connected by a network (usually the Internet) to solve large-scale computation problems.
- HPC
- high performance computing
- middleware
- A communications layer that allows applications to interact across hardware and network environments.
- NeSC
- National e-Science Centre
- OGF
- Open Grid Forum. Formerly known as the Global Grid Forum (GGF), a body that is attempting to standardise and document the processes and protocols that are, or will be, required to construct grids.
- OGSA
- Open Grid Services Architecture. An attempt being made in the OGF (q.v.) to map out the architecture of Grids.
- OGSA-DAI
- Open Grid Services Architecture - Data Access and Integration. A component that enables data access to data resources such as databases and files using web services.
- OpenMP
- A specification for a set of compiler directives, library routines, and environment variables that can be used to specify shared memory parallelism in Fortran and C/C++ programs.
- parallel computing
- The simultaneous execution of the same task (split up and specially adapted) on multiple processors in order to obtain faster results.
- Perl
- Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. A computer programming language [http://www.perl.org/]
- SOAP
- Simple Object Access Protocol. A set of W3C standards that define how the encoding of messages used by Web services is to be done.
- testbed
- A platform for experimentation for large development projects. They allow rigorous testing of scientific theories and new technologies.
- UKHEC
- UK High End Computing
- W3C
- World Wide Web Consortium. A standards body for the web and web services. [http://www.w3.org/]
- XML
- Extensible Markup Language [http://www.w3.org/XML/]