Trimble Software: Working With Large Datasets 12
Addendum C: Glossary of Terms
CUDA – (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is NVidia's parallel computing platform and API model.
GPU – (Graphics Processing Unit) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to rapidly manipulate and
alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs
are used in embedded systems, mobile phones, personal computers, workstations, and game consoles. Modern
GPUs are very efficient at manipulating computer graphics and image processing. Their highly parallel
structure makes them more efficient than general-purpose central processing units (CPUs) for algorithms that
process large blocks of data in parallel. In a personal computer, a GPU can be present on a video card or
embedded on the motherboard. In certain CPUs, they are embedded on the CPU die.
HHD – (Hard Disk Drive, hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk) is an electro-mechanical data storage device that
uses magnetic storage to store and retrieve digital data using one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated
with magnetic material.
NVMe – (Non Volatile Memory) is often NAND flash memory that comes in several physical form factors,
including solid-state drives (SSDs), PCI Express (PCIe) add-in cards, M.2 cards, and other forms.
OpenCL – (Open Computing Language) is a framework for writing programs that execute
across heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing
units (GPUs), digital signal processors (DSPs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and other processors
or hardware accelerators. OpenCL provides a standard interface for parallel computing using task- and data-
based parallelism.
PCI Express – (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-
speed serial computer expansion bus standard. A PCIe Lane is composed of two differential signaling pairs, with
one pair for receiving data and the other for transmitting. Thus, each lane is composed of four wires or signal
traces.
PCIe Gen3 (Nvidia) versus PCIe Gen4 (AMD) –
See Wikipedia article - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express
RAID – (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks or Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is a data storage
virtualization technology that combines multiple physical disk drive components into one or more logical units for
the purposes of data redundancy, performance improvement, or both.
SSD – (Solid-state Drive) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies to store
data persistently, typically using flash memory, and functioning as secondary storage in the hierarchy of
computer storage.
