GlossaryΒΆ
- API
- Acronym of Application Programming Interface. An API is a description of the way one piece of software asks another program to perform a service (quoted from: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/43487/Application_Programming_Interface which see for a more detailed explanation).
- Command-line
- The sequence of words typed at the terminal prompt in order to run a specified application.
- Command-line option
Arguments to a command (i.e., words on the command line) that select variants to the usual behavior of the command. For instance, a command-line option can request more verbose reporting.
Traditionally, UNIX command-line options consist of a dash (
-
), followed by one or more lowercase letters, or a double-dash (--
) followed by a complete word or compound word.For example, the words
-h
or--help
usually instruct a command to print a short usage message and exit immediately after.- Core
- A single computing unit. This was called a CPU until manufacturers started packing many processing units into a single package: now the term CPU is used for the package, and core is one of the several independent processing units within the package.
- CPU Time
- The total time that computing units (processor core) are actively executing a job. For single-threaded jobs, this is normally less then the actual duration (‘wall-clock time’ or walltime), because some time is lost in I/O and system operations. For parallel jobs the CPU time is normally larger than the duration, because several processor cores are active on the job at the same time; the quotient of the CPU time and the duration measures the efficiency of the parallel job.
- Job
- A computational job is a single run of a non-interactive application. The prototypical example is a run of GAMESS on a single input file.
- Persistent
- Used in the sense of preserved across program stops and system reboots. In practice, it just means that the relevant data is stored on disk or in some database.
- Resource
- Short for computational resource: any cluster or Grid where a job can run.
- State
- A one-word indication of a computational job execution
status (e.g.,
RUNNING
orTERMINATED
). The terms state and status are used interchangeably in GC3Pie documentation. - STDERR
- Abbreviation for “standard error stream”; it is the sequence of all text messages that a command prints to inform the user of problems or to report on operations progress. The Linux/UNIX system allows two separate output streams, one for output proper, named STDOUT, and STDERR for “error messages”. It is entirely up to the command to tag a message as “standard output” or “standard error”.
- STDOUT
- Abbreviation for “standard output stream”. It is the sequence of all characters that constitute the output of a command. The Linux/UNIX system allows two separate output streams, one for output proper, and one for “error messages”, dubbed STDERR. It is entirely up to the command to tag a message as “standard output” or “standard error”.
- Session
- A persistent collection of GC3Pie tasks and jobs. Sessions are used by The GC3Apps software to store job status across program runs.
- Walltime
- Short for wall-clock time: indicates the total running time of a job.