L-P

LAN: Local Area Network; a network employed within a single administrative domain such as a laboratory or office complex, connecting PCs and workstations together to file servers, printers and other peripherals, and to the Internet. Low cost LAN technology has been adopted to provide Beowulf-class systems with inexpensive moderate bandwidth interconnect
LED: Light Emitting Diode
Linux: the dominant Unix-like cross-platform operating system developed by a broad international community enabled by an open source code framework
Mbps: 1 million bits per second data transfer rate or bandwidth
Mega: prefix meaning 1 million or in the case of storage 2²⁰
message passing: An approach to parallelism based on communicating data between processes running (usually) on separate computers.
metadata: Used in the context of file systems, this is the information describing the file, including owner, permissions, and location of data
MPI: message passing interface, a community derived logical standard for the transfer of program messages between separate concurrent processes
MPP: Massively Parallel Processors
MTBF: Mean Time Between Failure
Myricom: vendor, distributor, and developer of the Myrinet network for commodity clusters
network: the combination of communication channels, switches, and interface controllers that transfer digital messages between Beowulf cluster nodes
NIC: network interface controller; usually the combination of hardware and software that matches the network transport layer to the computer node of a cluster
NOW: network or workstations, and early influential commodity cluster project at UC Berkeley
PC: See Personal Computer or PC.
PCI: the dominant external interface standard for PCs and workstations to support I/O controllers including NICs
Personal Computer or PC: mass market microprocessor based computer employed by both commercial and consumer users for everything from games to spreadsheets and internet browsers; emphasizing performance/cost for maximum market share, these nodes are the basis for low cost Beowulf-class clusters
PVFS: Parallel virtual file system
PVM: Parallel Virtual Machine, a library of functions supporting an advanced message-passing semantics