Glossary
Glossary- 2 AlphaServer 1000 Rackmount Owner's Guide
availability
The amount of scheduled time that a computing system provides application service
during the year. Availability is typically measured as a percentage of uptime per year; or,
if measured as system unavailability, as the number of hours of downtime per year.
backplane
The main board or panel that connects all of the modules in a computer system.
bandwidth
The rate of data transfer in a bus or I/O channel. It is expressed as the amount of data that
can be transferred in a given time, for example, as megabytes per second.
boot device
The device from which the system bootstrap software is acquired.
boot
A flag is a system parameter set by the user. Boot flags contain information that is read
and used by the bootstrap software during a system bootstrap procedure.
bootp
A load host protocol for UNIX host systems.
bootstrap
The process of loading an operating system into memory.
bus
A collection of many transmission lines or wires. The bus interconnects computer system
components, providing a communications path for addresses, data, and control information
or external terminals and systems in a communications network.
byte
A group of eight contiguous bits starting on an addressable byte boundary. The bits are
numbered right to left, 0 through 7.
cache memory
A small, high-speed memory placed between slower main memory and the processor. A
cache increases effective memory transfer rates and processor speed. It contains copies of
data recently used by the processor and fetches several bytes of data from memory in
anticipation that the processor will access the next sequential series of bytes.
