Abbreviations Used Throughout ParallelZone

The following is a list (in alphabetical order) of abbreviations encountered throughout ParallelZone. Pages are encouraged to use these abbreviations and to link to the abbreviation on its first use (instead of defining the abbreviation).

API

Application Programming Interface. The literal functions you call to programmatically interact with a software package.

CPU

Central processing unit.

GPU

Graphical processing unit.

MIMD

Multiple instructions, multiple data. A parallelism model in which each worker executes different instructions on different data.

MISD

Multiple instructions, single data. A parallelism model in which each worker executes different instructions on the same data.

MPI

Message Passing Interface. An API standard defining functions and utilities useful for writing software using distributed parallelism.

RAII

Resource acquisition is initialization. In C++ RAII has come to mean that resources (such as memory, file handles, basically anything whose use needs to be managed) should be tied to the lifetime of an object. This ensures that when the object is deleted the resources are released, which in turn helps avoid leaks.

SIMD

Single instruction, multiple data. Refers to a parallelism model in which each parallel worker has different data, but executes the same function on that data.

SISD

Single instruction, single data. Serial execution as expressed by the remaining permutation of single/multiple instruction(s), single/multiple data.