Glossary

AP

Access Point. This is where you login to access the cluster to submit and monitor jobs. These would be our various “-head” nodes; cse-head, csci-head, csci-lab-head.

Apptainer

Apptainer (formerly Singularity) simplifies the creation and execution of containers, ensuring software components are encapsulated for portability and reproducibility. apptainer(1)

bash

Bourne Again SHell. This is an extended and re-implemented super set version of the Bourne shell. See the man page for more details: bash(1)

bc

Basic Calculator. This is a simple command line calculator that features infinite precision. GNU BC (the version run on our cluster) was written by WWU’s Computer Science professor, Phil Nelson. bc(1)

EP

Execute Point. This is where your programs run in the cluster. Previously referred to as a compute node.

HPC

High Performance Computing. This can be thought of as leveraging multiple computing systems to perform one very large complex task.

HTC

High Throughput Computing. This is running as many jobs as possible to solve the a series of tasks. Instead of running one program with a giant problem, this is decomposing the problem into many small, independent problems.

LVM

Logical Volume Manager. This allows HTCondor to allocate the requested disk space and ensure that it’s available for the submitted job.

OCI

Open Containers Initiative. A group that helps define a standard for how to represent containers on disk. See the Open Containers page for information.

Python

A commonly used scripting language for all sorts of research.

sh

Bourne SHell. Named after Stephen Bourne, this usually refers to /bin/sh or a POSIX compliant shell. See the man page for more details: sh(1)

SSH

Secure SHell. This is a way to securely connect to a remote machine. See the man page for more details: ssh(1)

venv

Virtual Environment. This is something that many programming languages such as Python implement to manage local package installs on a per-project basis. See the Python documentation for the venv module.

VPN

Virtual Private Network. This is a way to implement a virtual network on top of an existing network, such as the Internet. This will allow you to create a secure network connection from your home system to the campus network on top of the internet.