Glossary

This page is an alphabetical list of technical terms which have a particular meaning for the Quine project.

• Actor - a unit of concurrent computation. An actor is a lightweight computational element which is single-threaded, encapsulates state, and communicates via message-passing.
• Edge - a relationship between two nodes in a graph.
• Graph - a logical data structure composed of Nodes and Edges.
• Member - a computer that participates in a cluster. In other systems this is sometimes called a “node”. Quine avoids using the term “node” so as not to be confused with a vertex in a graph. See: “Node”
• Node - a vertex in a graph.
• Persistor - a Quine-specific data storage mechanism used to persist data durably on disk. It may be on the same machine (even in the same process) as the Quine, or it may be served on a remote system.
• Position - a logical location in a Quine cluster which needs to be filled by a member.
• Shard - a logical division of the graph responsible for managing a subset of nodes.