P

parallel application

An application that uses a distributed programming model and can run on multiple processors. An HP XC MPI application is a parallel application. That is, all interprocessor communication within an HP XC parallel application is performed through calls to the MPI message passing library.

PXE

Preboot Execution Environment. A standard client/server interface that allows networked computers that are not yet installed with an operating system to be configured and booted remotely. PXE booting is configured at the BIOS level.

R

resource manager role

Nodes with this role manage the allocation of resources to user applications.

role

A set of services that are assigned to a node.

Root Administration Switch

A component of the administrative network. The top switch in the Administrative Network; it may be a logical network switch comprised of multiple hardware switches. The Root Console Switch is connected to the Root Administration Switch.

root node

A server within the XC system that is connected directly to the Root Administration Switch.

RPM

Red Hat Package Manager.

1.A utility that is used for software package management on a Linux operating system, most notably to install and remove software packages.

2.A software package that is capable of being installed or removed with the RPM software package management utility.

S

serial application

A command or user program that does not use any distributed shared-memory form of parallelism. A serial application is basically a single-processor application that has no communication library calls (for example, MPI, PVM, GM, or Portals).

An example of a serial application is a standard Linux command, such as the ls command. Another example of a serial application is a program that has been built on a Linux system that is binary compatible with the HP XC environment, but does not contain any of the HP XC infrastructure libraries.

SMP

Symmetric multiprocessing. A system with two or more CPUs that share equal (symmetric) access to all of the facilities of a computer system, such as the memory and I/O subsystems. In an HP XC system, the use of SMP technology increases the number of CPUs (amount of computational power) available per unit of space.

ssh

Secure Shell. A shell program for logging in to and executing commands on a remote computer. It can provide secure encrypted communications between two untrusted hosts over an insecure network.

Glossary-5