Some Terminology - 7

Network Information Services (NIS) - Developed by Sun Microsystems, NIS is a means of storing network wide information in central databases (NIS servers), where they can be accessed by any of the clients. Typically, a NIS database will be used to store the user password file, mail aliases, group identification numbers, and network resources.

Parallel Job - This can be defined as a single application (job) that has multiple processes that run concurrently . Generally each process will run on a different processor (workstation) and communicate boundary, or other data, between the processes at regular intervals. Typically a parallel job would utilise a message passing interface, such as MPI or PVM, to pass data between the processes.