Glossary

The use of parallel processing for running advanced application programs efficiently, reliably and quickly.

A system that performs at or near the currently highest operational rate for computers. Some supercomputers work at over half a petaflop or 10¹⁵ floating-point operations per second.

Number of floating point operations per second

Peak Flops, the theoretical measure of floating point potential

Currently, as measured by LinPack (http://www.top500.org)

High Performance Interconnect

This usually means Infiniband

Originally born out of high performance computing

Enhancing the capability of the network of things rather than making applications run faster

Group of tightly coupled (usually with a high performance interconnect) computers that work together

Commodity based cluster COTS (commodity-off-the-shelf) components

Linux, Intel/AMD

Loosely coupled cluster (no high performance interconnect)

32 bits

Significand of 24 bits

Exponent of 7 bits

1 sign bit

64 bits

Significand of 52 bits

Exponent of 11 bits

1 sign bit