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Glossary

Welcome to the TeraGrid Glossary. The terms and abbreviations that are involved in High Performance / Grid computing can be confusing at first. Check out the list below to better your understanding of the terminology that you will see around the site.

Cyberinfrastructure - the following definitions are from wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberinfrastructure) Cyberinfrastructure describes the new research environments that support advanced data acquisition, data storage, data management, data integration, data mining, data visualization and other computing and information processing services over the Internet. In scientific usage, cyberinfrastructure is a technological solution to the problem of efficiently connecting data, computers, and people with the goal of enabling derivation of novel scientific theories and knowledge. Like the physical infrastructure of roads, bridges, power grids, telephone lines, and water systems that support modern society, "cyberinfrastructure" refers to the distributed computer, information and communication technologies combined with the personnel and integrating components that provide a long-term platform to empower the modern scientific research endeavor. Per the Access News Release: "National Science Foundation Releases New Report from Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure." Wikipedia's Definition

Grid Computing -is an emerging computing model that provides the ability to perform higher throughput computing by taking advantage of many networked computers to model a virtual computer architecture that is able to distribute process execution across a parallel infrastructure. Grids use the resources of many separate computers connected by a network to solve large-scale computation problems. Grids provide the ability to perform computations on large data sets, by breaking them down into many smaller ones, or provide the ability to perform many more computations at once than would be possible on a single computer, by modeling a parallel division of labour between processes.

High Performance Computing (HPC) - comprises computing applications on (parallel) supercomputers and computer clusters. Usually, computer systems in or above the teraflop-region are counted as HPC-computers.

TeraGrid - TeraGrid is an open scientific discovery infrastructure combining leadership class resources at eight partner sites to create an integrated, persistent computational resource. Using high-performance network connections, the TeraGrid integrates high-performance computers, data resources and tools, and high-end experimental facilities around the country. These integrated resources include more than 102 teraflops of computing capability and more than 15 petabytes (quadrillions of bytes) of online and archival data storage with rapid access and retrieval over high-performance networks. Through the TeraGrid, researchers can access over 100 discipline-specific databases. With this combination of resources, the TeraGrid is the world's largest, most comprehensive distributed cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research.

Grid Infastructure Group (GIG) -The TeraGrid is coordinated through the Grid Infrastructure Group (GIG) at the University of Chicago, working in partnership with the Resource Provider sites. The GIG responsibilities include overall architecture and planning, software integration, operations and management, and coordination of user support.

Have any terms that you would like to see here? E-mail us at eot-help@teragrid.org.