A

Algorithm A procedure designed to solve a problem. Scientific computing programs implement algorithms.

ANIR Advanced Networking Infrastructure and Research Division, part of NSF/CISE.

ANL DOE's Argonne National Laboratory.

ANSI American National Standards Institute.

APAN Asian-Pacific Advanced Network.

API Applications programming interface.

APOALA An EPA-supported research project at Pennsylvania State University using an integrated approach for representation and analysis of space-time environmental data.

ASAP ASCI's Academic Strategic Alliance Program.

ASCI DOE's Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative.

ASDE ASCI Simulation Development Environment.

ATDNet Advanced Technology Demonstration Network.

ATLAS An ORNL project focused on automatically generating and optimizing numerical software for processors with deep memory hierarchies and pipelined functional units.

ATM Asynchronous Transfer Mode, a telecommunications technology, also known as cell switching, which is based on 53-byte cells.

Aztec SNL's library of state-of-the-art iterative methods for solving linear equations.

B

Backbone Network A high capacity electronic trunk - for example the NSF vBNS backbone - connecting lower capacity networks.

Bandwidth A measure of the capacity of a communications channel to transmit information; for example, millions of bits per second or Mb/s.

Benchmark A point of reference (artifact) to compare an aspect of systems performance (for example, a well-known set of programs). Also, to conduct and assess the computation or transmission capabilities of a system using a well known artifact.

Bit An acronym for binary digit.

Bps, or B/s An acronym for bytes per second. bps, or b/s An acronym for bits per second.

BT British Telecom.

Byte A group of adjacent binary digits operated upon as a unit (usually connotes a group of eight bits).

C

C C programming language.

C++ C++ programming language, an object-oriented descendant of the C language.

CA*Net Canada's high performance network.

CAD Computer-aided design.

CalTech California Institute of Technology.

CAPI Cryptographic API.

CAT Computerized axial tomography.

CAVE Cave Automatic Virtual Environment. A surround screen, surround sound, projection-based virtual reality (VR) system. See http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Vis/, http://www.ummu.umich.edu/labs/vr/cave.html

C-CR Computing-Communications Research Division, part of NSF/CISE.

CD Compact disc.

CDSA Common Data Security Architecture.

CERN European Laboratory for Particle Physics.

CIC Computing, Information, and Communications.

CIO Chief Information Officer.

CISE NSF's Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering.

CITS Center for Integrated Turbulence Simulations.

CLCS Kennedy Space Center's Checkout and Launch Control System.

CMU Carnegie Mellon University.

CORBA Common Object Request Broker Architecture.

CoS Class of Service.

COTS Commercial off-the-shelf. Describes hardware and software that are readily available commercially.

CSLU Oregon Graduate Institute's Center for Spoken Language Understanding.

CSTB Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, part of the National Academy of Science/National Research Council.

CT Committee on Technology. The Committee on Technology (CT), one of five committees under the Presidential National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), advises and assists the NSTC in increasing the overall effectiveness and productivity of Federal technology R&D.

CU Columbia University.

CU Cornell University.

D

DARPA Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Agency funded by the US Government of Defense, with a brief to fund high-technology research and development projects.

DFS Distributed File System.

DHHS Department of Health and Human Services.

DIA Defense Intelligence Agency.

DICPM Distributed Information, Computation, and Process Management.

DIPPER NIST'S Distributed Internet Protocol and PERformance test system.

DISS Distributed Image Spreadsheet.

DL Digital Libraries.

DLI Digital Libraries Initiative.

DLT Digital Library Technology.

DNA Deoxyribonucleic Acid, a biomolecule from which genes are composed.

DoD Department of Defense.

DOE Department of Energy.

DREN DoD's Defense Research and Engineering Network.

DSSs Computer-based Decision Support Systems.

DWDM Dense Wave Division Multiplexing.

E

ED Department of Education.

EDA Electronic Design Automation.

EPA Environmental Protection Agency.

EPSCoR NSF's Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research.

ESNet DOE's Energy Sciences Network.

ETHR Education, Training, and Human Resources. One of the five HPCC Program Component Areas.

EVA Extra Vehicular Activity.

EVL Electronic Visualization Laboratory.

Exa- A prefix denoting 1018, or a million trillion; for example, exabytes.

F

FAA Federal Aviation Administration.

FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Federated Information Sources Information sources which are used together, but which are not under a single authority. Federated information sources are therefore not necessarily willing or equipped to participate in common communication protocols, such as transaction support.

FBSC NIH's Frederick Biomedical Supercomputing Center.

FDM Finite Differences Method.

FedNets Federal agency networks.

FedStats Federal Statistics.

FEMA Federal Emergency Management Agency.

FIPS Federal Information Processing Standards. See http://csrc.nist.gov/fips/

FISAC Federal Information Services and Applications Council, formerly the Applications Council, which reports to the Subcommittee on CIC R&D.

Flops Acronym for floating point operations per second. The term "floating point" refers to that format of numbers that is most commonly used for scientific calculation. Flops is used as a measure of a computing system's speed of performing basic arithmetic operations such as adding, subtracting, multiplying, or dividing two numbers.

fMRI Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

FSL NOAA's Forecast Systems Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado.

FY Fiscal Year.

G

G7 Group of Seven Economic Leaders.

G, or Giga- A prefix denoting 109, or a billion; for example, Gflops or gigaflops, gigabytes, gigabits.

GB An acronym for Gigabyte.

Gb An acronym for Gigabit.

GBpd Gigabytes per day.

Gbps Gigabits per second.

GEO Geosynchronous Earth Orbiting, referring to a satellite.

GFDL NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.

Gflops Gigaflops, billions of floating point operations per second.

Gigapops Gigabit per second points of presence.

GIS Geographic Information System.

GOIN Global Observation Information Network.

GPS Global Positioning System.

GSA General Services Administration.

GSFC NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

GSM A European cellular communications system.

GUSTO Globus Ubiquitous Supercomputing Testbed Organization.

H

HAZUS Hazard loss estimation methodology.

HCI Human Computer Interaction. Also known as CHI, as in 'the CHI Conference'.

HCS High Confidence Systems. One of the five HPCC Program Component Areas.

HECC High End Computing and Computation. One of the five HPCC Program Component Areas.

HECCWG High End Computing and Computation Working Group.

Heterogeneous system A system that contains more than one kind of computer.

HiPPI High Performance Parallel Interface.

HPASE NSF's High Performance Applications for Science and Engineering.

HPC High performance computing.

HPCC High Performance Computing and Communications. The Federal HPCC R&D programs were for several years known as the CIC R&D programs.

HPNAT High Performance Networking Applications Team, which reports to the LSN Working Group.

HPNSP High Performance Network Service Provider.

HPS NOAA's Hurricane Prediction System.

HPSS High Performance Storage System.

HPVM High Performance Virtual Machine.

HSCC A SuperNet testbed.

HTML Hypertext Markup Language. An SGML-based text markup language used on the WWW (World Wide Web). See http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/

HTMT Hybrid Technology Multithreaded Technology.

HU Harvard University.

HuCS Human Centered Systems. One of the five HPCC Program Component Areas.

I

IA Information assurance.

I&A Identification and authentication.

IAIMS NLM's Integrated Academic Information Management System.

IBM International Business Machines Corporation.

ICE Information and Content Exchange Protocol.

ICSP Interagency Council on Statistical Policy.

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.

IETF Internet Engineering Task Force - an all volunteer organization responsible for publishing RFCs and Internet Standards.

IGERT NSF's Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training.

IGM NLM's Internet Grateful Med.

iGrid International Grid.

IKE Internet Key Exchange protocol.

INFOSEC INFOrmation SECurity.

Internet The global collection of interconnected, multiprotocol computer communications networks including Federal, private, and international networks.

I2 Internet2.

I/O Input/Output.

IIPA International Intellectual Property Alliance.A private sector coalition formed in 1984 to represent the U.S. copyright-based industries - business software, films, videos, music, sound recordings, books and journals, and interactive entertainment software - in bilateral and multilateral efforts to improve international protection of copyrighted materials.

IITA Information Infrastructure Technology and Applications.

IITF Information Infrastructure Task Force. The White House formed the Information Infrastructure Task Force (IITF) to develop comprehensive technology, telecommunications, and information policies, and promote applications by helping build consensus on difficult policy issues.

Informatics The art and science of processing data to produce information. Medical Informatics; Social Informatics.

IR Information Retrieval. The process of recovering or extracting the required information from an information base.

Information Technology R&D Working Group The Subcommittee on Computing, Information, and Communications R&D (CIC R&D) coordinates Federal High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) R&D programs.

IP Internet Protocol.

IPsec IP Security Protocol.

IPsec WIT IPsec Web-based Interoperability Tester.

IRFC Internet Request for Comment (or RFC). IRFC documents are the written definitions of the protocols and policies of the Internet. RFCs are published through the IETF by working groups. See http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/information/rfc.html

ISAKMP Internet Security Association and Key Management Protocol.

ISE NASA's Intelligent Synthesis Environment.

ISOC Internet Society

ISPI NIST's Integrated Services Protocol Instrument, an interactive measurement tool for experiments in realtime transport and resource reservation protocols.

IST Internet Security Team, which reports to the LSN Working Group.

IT Information Technology.

IT2 "Information Technology for the Twenty-First Century," a proposed Presidential initiative to increase the Government's investment in information technology R&D.

ITCM FISAC's Information Technology for Crises Management Team.

ITL NIST's Information Technology Laboratory.

IU Indiana University-Bloomington.

IVA Intra Vehicular Activity.

J

Java An operating system-independent programming language. Initially designed for use on the Internet as a simpler, object-oriented alternative to C++, Java can be used to create complete applications that run on one computer or on a network of computers, and can be employed in coding small interactive application modules (applets) used in Web pages. See java.sun.com

JET Joint Engineering Team, which reports to the LSN Working Group.

JHU John Hopkins University.

K

K, or Kilo- A prefix denoting 103, or a thousand; for example, kilobits.

Kbps Kilobits per second or thousands of bits per second.

KDI NSF's Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence Program.

Km Kilometers.

KN NSF's Knowledge Networking Program.

L

LAN Local area network.

LANL DOE's Los Alamos National Laboratory.

LBNL DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

LEO Low Earth Orbiting, referring to satellite.

LIRA Learning Information Retrieval Agent.

LIS NSF's Learning and Intelligent Systems Program.

LLNL DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

LONIR Laboratory of Neuro Imaging Resource.

LSN Large Scale Networking. One of the five HPCC Program Component Areas.

LSNWG Large Scale Networking Working Group. R&D.

LTP NASA's Learning Technologies Project.

M

M, or Mega- A prefix denoting 106, or a million; for example, Mbps, or megabits per second, Mflops.

MANET Mobile Ad-hoc Networks.

MAP Memory Algorithm Processor.

MARS Mobile Autonomous Robot Software.

MB An acronym for Megabyte.

Mb An acronym for Megabit.

Mbps Megabits per second or millions of bits per second.

MCM Multichip module.

MEII Minimum Essential Information Infrastructure.

MEL NIST's Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory.

Mflops Megaflops, millions of floating point operations per second.

MirNET U.S.-Russian network consortium.

MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

MMC DOE's Materials Microcharacterization Collaboratory.

MOM 3 NOAA's Modular Ocean Model, Version 3.

MONET Multiwavelength Optical Networking.

MPI Message Passing Interface.

MPICH-G Globus enabled version of MPI.

MPI-I/O Message Passing Interface-Input/Output.

MPLS Multi Protocol Label Switching.

MPP Massively parallel processors.

MRI Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

MSEL NIST's Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory.

MSU Michigan State University.

MTA Multi-threaded Architecture.

N

NAC Neuroimaging Analysis Center supported by NIH's NCRR.

NAP Network Access Point.

NASA National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

NCAR National Center for Atmospheric Research.

NCBI NLM's National Center for Biotechnology Information.

NCC NSF's New Computational Challenges Program.

NCEP NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Prediction.

NCI National Cancer Institute, part of NIH.

NCO/CIC National Coordination Office for Computing, Information, and Communications. The NCO's primary mission is to coordinate Federal multiagency information technology (IT) research and development (R&D) programs. These programs include the High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) programs, the Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative, and the proposed Information Technology for the 21st Century (IT2) initiative.

NCRR National Center for Research Resources, part of NIH.

NCSA National Computational Science Alliance, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, successor to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Part of NSF's PACI.

NERSC DOE's National Energy Research Supercomputer Center.

netCDF Common Data Format widely used in the oceanographic and meteorological research communities.

Network Computer communications technologies that link multiple computers for sharing information and resources across geographically dispersed locations.

NEXRAD NOAA's Next Generation Weather Radar.

NGI Next Generation Internet, a Presidential initiative that is part of the HPCC R&D programs.

NGIX Next Generation Internet Exchange Point.

NGS NSF's Next Generation Software Program.

NHC NOAA's National Hurricane Center.

NIAP National Information Assurance Partnership.

NIDRR ED's National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research.

NIH National Institutes of Health, part of DHHS.

NII National Information Infrastructure. A wide range and ever-expanding range of equipment including cameras, scanners, keyboards, telephones, fax machines, computers, switches, compact disks, video and audio tape, cable, wire, satellites, optical fiber transmission lines, microwave nets, switches, televisions, monitors, printers, and much more.

NISN NASA Integrated Services Network.

NIST National Institute of Standards and Technology, part of the Department of Commerce.

NLANR National Laboratory for Applied Networking Research, sponsored by NSF.

NLM National Library of Medicine, part of NIH.

NMR National Medical Resource.

NOAA National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, part of the Department of Commerce.

NORDUnet A network spanning the Nordic countries.

NPACI NSF's National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure. Part of NSF's PACI.

NRCAM NIH-supported National Resource for Cell Analysis and Modeling.

NREN NASA's Research and Education Network.

NRL Naval Research Laboratory, part of DoD.

NRT Networking Research Team, which reports to the LSN Working Group.

NSA National Security Agency, part of DoD.

NSF National Science Foundation.

NSFNET An NSF computer network program, predecessor to vBNS.

NSTC National Science and Technology Council. This Cabinet-level Council is the principal means for the President to coordinate science, space, and technology of Federal research and development enterprise.

NTIA National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Responsible for the Information Superhighway.

NTON National Transparent Optical Network.

NUMA Non-uniform Memory Access.

O

ODEs Ordinary Differential Equations.

OGI Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology.

OHSU Oregon Health Sciences University.

OMB White House Office of Management and Budget.

OMG Object Management Group

ONR Office of Naval Research.

ORNL DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

OS Operating system.

OSHA Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

OSTP Office of Science and Technology Policy. Created in 1976 to provide the President with timely policy advice and to coordinate science and technology investment.

P

PACI NSF's Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure.

ParAgent An EPA-supported interactive tool for automatic parallelization of specific classes of programs. Parallel processing Simultaneous processing by more than one processing unit on a single application.

PARC Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

ParVox NASA's Parallel Volume Rendering System for Scientific Visualization.

PathForward An ASCI program to develop the technologies needed to produce the next generation ultra-scale computing systems.

PCA Program Component Area. The HPCC R&D programs are organized into five PCAs: High End Computing and Computation (HECC); Large Scale Networking (LSN); High Confidence Systems (HCS); Human Centered Systems (HuCS); and Education, Training, and Human Resources (ETHR). Each PCA spans an area in which multiple agencies have activities.

PCASYS NIST's public domain Pattern-level Classification Automation SYStem.

PDEs Partial Differential Equations.

Penn State Pennsylvania State University.

PET Positron emission tomography.

Peta- A prefix denoting 1015, or a thousand trillion; for example, petabits.

PETSc The Portable Extensible Toolkit for Scientific computation.

pflop/s Petaflops, 1015 flops.

PITAC President's Information Technology Advisory Committee. Established by President Clinton on February 11, 1997, the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, (originally the Presidential Advisory Committee on High Performance Computing and Communications, Information Technology, and the Next Generation Internet) provide the President, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the Federal agencies involved in CIC R&D with guidance and advice on all areas of high performance computing, communications, and information technologies.

PKI Public key infrastructure.

PMEL NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, Washington.

POPTEX A software tool developed at LANL that provides interactive visualization capabilities.

Q

QBone I2's end-to-end QoS testbed to accelerate the development of interdomain quality of service.

QC Quantum Computing.

QoS Quality of Service.

R

R&D Research and development.

RAMM Remote Access Multidimensional Microscopy.

RBAC Role Based Access Control.

RERC NIDRR's Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers.

RISC Reduced instruction set chip, a type of microprocessor.

RSPAC Remote Sensing Public Access Center.

RTEC Regional Technology in Education Consortium.

RUC-2 Rapid Update Cycle.

S

SC Acronym for supercomputing.

Scalable A system is scalable if it can be made to have more (or less) computational power by configuring it with a larger (or smaller) number of processors, amount of memory, interconnection bandwidth, input/output bandwidth, and mass storage.

SDE Simulation Development Environment.

SDI Selective Dissemination of Information. See Bibliography of SDI

SDSC San Diego Supercomputer Center.

SGI Silicon Graphics, Inc.

SGML Standard Generalized Markup Language is a system for defining markup languages. Authors mark up their documents by representing structural, presentational, and semantic information alongside content. See http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/intro/sgmltut.html

SIGINT SIGnals INTelligence.

SIMA NIST's Systems Integration for Manufacturing Applications.

SingaREN Singapore network.

SMS Scalable Modeling System.

SNL Sandia National Laboratories.

SNMP Simple Network Management Protocol.

SONET Synchronous Optical Network Transmission.

SOS Nashville Southern Oxidant Study.

S&T Science and technology.

SSP ASCI's Stockpile Stewardship Program.

STAR TAP Science, Technology and Research Transit Access Point, an international transit network meeting point in Chicago.

STIMULATE Speech, Text, Image, and MULtimedia Advanced Technology Effort.

STT Space-Time Toolkit.

STU-III Secure Telephone Unit, 3rd generation, the standard secure telephone for the U.S. Government.

Subcommittee on CIC R&D Subcommittee on Computing, Information, and Communications Research and Development, which reports to the NSTC Committee on Technology.

SUMAA3d Scalable Unstructured Mesh Algorithms and Applications.

SuperNet A DARPA network expected to provide 10 to 100 Gbps speeds in FY 1999-FY 2000.

SURFnet Netherlands network.

T

T, or Tera- A prefix denoting 1012 or a trillion; for example, terabits, teraflops.

TANet Taiwan academic network.

Tbps Terabits-per-second.

TCP Transmission Control Protocol.

TID Trusted Image Dissemination.

TOXNET An NLM toxic substances information retrieval service.

TransPAC U.S./Asia-Pacific Consortium.

TRVS DARPA's Text, Radio, Video, and Speech Program.

U

UAH University of Alabama in Huntsville.

UA University of Arizona.

UCAID University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development.

UCB University of California-Berkeley.

UCD University of California-Davis.

UCLA University of California-Los Angeles.

UCSD University of California-San Diego.

UCSB University of California-Santa Barbara.

UIUC University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign.

UK University of Kentucky.

UMLS NIH's Unified Medical Language System.

URC Uniform Resource Characteristic Uniform Resource Citation - a collection of attribute/values about an object. Some of the values may be URIs. URCs are not formally defined, yet.

URI Universal Resource Identifier - an address of some sort. IETF URI- WG and the W3C

URL Uniform Resource Locator. URLs are a particular kind of URI. See http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/Overview.html

URN Uniform Resource Name. URNs are another kind of URI. Names are more persistent than Locations. A location may change, but a name rarely will.

USC University of Southern California.

USC University of South Carolina.

USGS United States Geological Survey.

U.S. United States.

V

VA Department of Veterans Affairs.

VAST VisAnalysis Systems Technology.

vBNS NSF's very high performance Backbone Network Services.

vDOC Virtual Distributed Online Clinic.

VH NLM's Visible Human Project.

Virginia Tech Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

VLANs Virtual Local Area Networks.

VLSI Very Large Scale Integration.

VRML Virtual Reality Modeling Language.

VSAT Very Small Aperture Terminal.

W

WAI Web Accessibility Initiative.

WAN Wide area network.

WDM Wavelength division multiplexing.

Web A reference to the World Wide Web.

Wireless technologies Communications technologies that use radio, microwave, or satellite communications channels versus wire, coaxial, or optical fiber.

WW Whisker Weaving, an algorithm for generating 3-D unstructured hexahedral meshes.

WWW World Wide Web.

W3C World Wide Web Consortium.

X

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML). A subset of SGML, the goal of which is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML. See http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/ and http://www.w3.org/XML/

Y

YCMI Yale Center for Medical Informatics