Compaq ProLiant 3000 intraNetWare Symmetric Multiprocessing - Page 11
Glossary Of Multiprocessing Terminology
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ECG045/1097 INTEGRATION NOTE (cont.) 1...1 GLOSSARY OF MULTIPROCESSING TERMINOLOGY Bandwidth Increasing the network operating system server capacity by reducing CPU utilization and allowing more services and applications to run. Cache Coherency The monitoring of the state of data stored in multiple caches to ensure that no processor acts on stale data. Locks: Controls within multithreaded software that prevent more than one thread from accessing the same area of memory simultaneously. Multitasking The execution of multiple applications or threads to provide simultaneous execution. Multithreading The multitasking of separate threads within a process or application. Mutex Mutual Exclusion refers to atomic lock variables which are used to prevent multiple processors from accessing shared data structures at the same instant. Platform Specific Module (PSM) A driver or layer that interfaces between the operating system and the hardware, freeing the OS from being dependent upon particular hardware components. Process One or more threads and the resources allocated to them, including a virtual address space. Each instance of any application runs within its own process. Processor Affinity The assignment of threads to a given CPU or subset of CPUs to capitalize on processor caches. A high percentage of cache hits results in improved performance. Scaling The percentage of increase in throughput, or work accomplished--relative to processor 0--when additional processors are added. Scalability is the incremental increased related to the addition of each processor. Semaphore Restricts access to global variables or system-level resources. For example, it blocks additional threads from writing to a serial port while another thread is using it. When a thread obtains a semaphore, it changes the resource's state to owned, then when completed, changes the state back to unowned and releases the semaphore. Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) The ability of an operating system to distribute tasks to all available CPUs in a hardware platform and to execute these tasks in parallel. Thread A single path or entity of execution within one process.