OMB 



OITice of Management and Budget 



Ops 



Acronym for operations per second. Ops is used as a rating of the speed of computer systems 

 and components. In this report ops is generally taken to mean the usual integer or Hoating 

 point operations depending on what functional units are included in a particular system con- 

 figuration. 



OSI 



Open Systems Interconnection 



OSTP 



Office of Science and Technology Policy 



Parallel processing 



Simultaneous processing by more than one processing unit on a single application 



Peta- 



10" of... (e.g.. petahits) 



Port 



Transport a computer program from one computer system to another 



Portable 



Portable computer programs can be run with little or no change on many kinds of computer 

 systems. 



Prototype 



The original demonstration model of what is expected to be a series of systems. Prototypes 

 are u.sed to prove feasibility, but often arc not as efficient or well-designed as later production 

 models. 



R&D 



Research and development 



Scalable 



A system is scalable if it can be made to have more (or less) computational power by config- 

 uring it with a larger (or smaller) number of processors, amount of memory, interconnection 

 bandwidth, input/output bandwidth, and amount of mass storage. 



SIMD 



Single Instruction Multiple Data 



SONET 



Synchronous Optical Network 



Tera- 



10'" or trillions of ... (e.g.. terabits, teraflops) 



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