Glossary

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 or TERMINATED). 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.