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20-letter words containing p, r, e, c, s

  • explicit parallelism — A feature of a programming language for a parallel processing system which allows or forces the programmer to annotate his program to indicate which parts should be executed as independent parallel tasks. This is obviously more work for the programmer than a system with implicit parallelism (where the system decides automatically which parts to run in parallel) but may allow higher performance.
  • feather in one's cap — one of the horny structures forming the principal covering of birds, consisting typically of a hard, tubular portion attached to the body and tapering into a thinner, stemlike portion bearing a series of slender, barbed processes that interlock to form a flat structure on each side.
  • field ion microscope — a device in which the atomic structure of the surface of a conductor is made visible by introducing helium gas into the device and applying a high voltage to ionize and accelerate the gas toward a fluorescent screen.
  • field-ion microscope — a device in which the atomic structure of the surface of a conductor is made visible by introducing helium gas into the device and applying a high voltage to ionize and accelerate the gas toward a fluorescent screen.
  • file descriptor leak — (programming)   (Or "fd leak" /F D leek/) A kind of programming bug analogous to a core leak, in which a program fails to close file descriptors ("fd"s) after file operations are completed, and thus eventually runs out of them. See leak.
  • flame-fusion process — Verneuil process.
  • general public virus — (software, legal)   A pejorative name for some versions of the GNU project copyleft or General Public License (GPL), which requires that any tools or application programs incorporating copylefted code must be source-distributed on the same terms as GNU code. Thus it is alleged that the copyleft "infects" software generated with GNU tools, which may in turn infect other software that reuses any of its code.
  • go like the clappers — to move extremely fast
  • graphics accelerator — (graphics, hardware)   Hardware (often an extra circuit board) to perform tasks such as plotting lines and surfaces in two or three dimensions, filling, shading and hidden line removal.
  • group life insurance — a form of life insurance available to members of a group, typically employees of a company, under a master policy.
  • hard gelatin capsule — A hard gelatin capsule is a type of capsule that is usually used to contain medicine in the form of dry powder or very small pellets.
  • harmonic progression — a series of numbers the reciprocals of which are in arithmetic progression.
  • heteropolysaccharide — (carbohydrate) any polysaccharide formed from two or more different kinds of monosaccharide.
  • hipparchus satellite — an astronometric satellite launched in 1989 by the European Space Agency that measured the position, proper motion, and brightness of 118 218 stars down to 12th magnitude and the magnitude and colour of a million stars down to 10th magnitude
  • hire-purchase system — a system of payment for a commodity in regular installments while using it.
  • hydraulic suspension — a system of motor-vehicle suspension using hydraulic members, often with hydraulic compensation between front and rear systems (hydroelastic suspension)
  • hydrostatic pressure — Hydrostatic pressure is the pressure exerted by a liquid that depends on how deep it is.
  • hyperadrenocorticism — Cushing's syndrome.
  • hypercholesterolemia — the presence of an excessive amount of cholesterol in the blood.
  • hypercholesterolemic — (pathology) Of, pertaining to, or having hypercholesterolemia.
  • hyperhomocysteinemia — (medicine) The presence of an excessive amount of homocysteine in the blood.
  • implicit parallelism — (parallel)   A feature of a programming language for a parallel processing system which decides automatically which parts to run in parallel. The best way of providing implicit parallelism is still (1995) an active research topic. The problem is to generate the right number of parallel tasks of the right size (or "granularity"). Too many tasks and the system gets bogged down in house-keeping, or memory for waiting tasks runs out, too few tasks and processors are left idle. The best performance is usually achieved with explicit parallelism where the programmer can annotate his program to indicate which parts should be executed as independent parallel tasks.
  • income tax inspector — a person whose job is to assess individuals' income tax liability
  • incomprehensibleness — The state of being incomprehensible.
  • indicated horsepower — the horsepower of a reciprocating engine as shown by an indicator record. Abbreviation: ihp, IHP.
  • insolvency provision — the right of employees of a firm that goes bankrupt or into receivership to receive money owed to them as wages, etc
  • instruction prefetch — (architecture)   A technique which attempts to minimise the time a processor spends waiting for instructions to be fetched from memory. Instructions following the one currently being executed are loaded into a prefetch queue when the processor's external bus is otherwise idle. If the processor executes a branch instruction or receives an interrupt then the queue must be flushed and reloaded from the new address. Instruction prefetch is often combined with pipelining in an attempt to keep the pipeline busy. By 1995 most processors used prefetching, e.g. Motorola 680x0, Intel 80x86.
  • insulin-coma therapy — a former treatment for mental illness, especially schizophrenia, employing insulin-induced hypoglycemia as a method for producing convulsive seizures.
  • interplanetary space — the region of space occurring around the sun and planets of the solar system. The density is normally negligible although cosmic rays, meteorites, gas clouds, etc, can occur
  • isometric projection — a type of axonometric projection in which the object is shown with its three principal axes all equally tilted from the plane of viewing, with two of them usually tilted 30 degrees upward from the horizontal
  • james prescott joule — James Prescott, 1818–89, English physicist.
  • judicial proceedings — any action involving or carried out by a court of law
  • keep a straight face — look serious, avoid smiling
  • keep one's pecker up — If you tell someone to keep their pecker up, you are encouraging them to be cheerful in a difficult situation.
  • king charles spaniel — a variety of the English toy spaniel having a black-and-tan coat.
  • lampbrush chromosome — a chromosome with looped projections resembling a brush
  • life-support machine — A life-support machine is the equipment that is used to keep a person alive when they are very ill and cannot breathe without help.
  • light-weight process — (operating system, parallel)   (LWP) A single-threaded sub-process which, unlike a thread, has its own process identifier and may also differ in its inheritance and controlling features. Several operating systems, e.g. SunOS 5.x, provide system calls for creating and controlling LWPs.
  • linear address space — A memory addressing scheme used in processors where the whole memory can be accessed using a single address that fits in a single register or instruction. This contrasts with a segmented memory architecture, such as that used on the Intel 8086, where an address is given by an offset from a base address held in one of the "segment registers". Linear addressing greatly simplifies programming at the assembly language level but requires more instruction word bits to be allocated for an address.
  • linguistic geography — dialect geography.
  • lost property office — room for mislaid objects
  • lunisolar precession — the principal component of the precession of the equinoxes, produced by the gravitational attraction of the sun and the moon on the equatorial bulge of the earth.
  • malpighian corpuscle — Also called kidney corpuscle, Malpighian body. the structure at the beginning of a vertebrate nephron, consisting of a glomerulus and its surrounding Bowman's capsule.
  • matched-pairs design — (of an experiment) concerned with measuring the values of the dependent variables for pairs of subjects that have been matched to eliminate individual differences and that are respectively subjected to the control and the experimental condition
  • megabytes per second — (unit)   (MBps, MB/s) Millions of bytes per second. A unit of data rate. 1 MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes per second (not 1,048,576).
  • megakaryocytopoiesis — (biology) The cellular development process that leads to platelet production.
  • meissner's corpuscle — tactile corpuscle.
  • memory address space — (architecture)   1. Any part of a processor's address space that is occupied by memory. 2. The range of addresses seen by a memory device relative to the base address at which it is mapped into the processor's address space.
  • mickey mouse program — (jargon)   The North American equivalent of a "noddy program", i.e. trivial. The term doesn't necessarily have the belittling connotations of mainstream slang "Oh, that's just mickey mouse stuff!"; sometimes trivial programs can be very useful.
  • microelectrophoresis — any of several techniques for observing, by means of a microscope or an ultramicroscope, the electrophoresis of minute surface particles.
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