HP XC System Software Hardware Preparation Guide Version 2.1

P
parallel application
An application that uses a distributed programming model and can run on multiple processors.
An HP XC MPI appli cation is a para ll el appli catio n. Th at is, all inter processor communication
within an HP XC par allel application is performed t hro ugh calls to the MPI message p a ssi ng
library.
PXE
Preboot Ex ecution Environmen t. A s tand ard client/server interface that allows networked
computers that are not yet i nstalled with an operatin g system to be config ured and booted
remotely. PXE booting is con fig ured at the BIOS level.
R
resource management 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. T he top switch in the Administrative Network; it
may be a logical network switch comprised of multiple hardw are switches. The Root Console
Switch is connected to the Root Administration Switch.
root node
A node within an XC system that is connected directly to the Root Administration S wi tch.
RPM
Red Hat Package Manager.
1. A utility that is used fo r 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-mem ory 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 ex ample 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 doe s not contain any of the HP
XC infrastructure libraries.
SMP
Symmetr ic multipro cessi ng. A system with t w o or mor e 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