Common terms used in mainframe systems

1. EMULATOR

An Application program which acts as an interface between the Computer system and Mainframe system. It receives the information from PC as ASCII format and converts them into EBCDIC and vice versa.

2. SIMULATOR

A computer system which simulates EBCDIC as the primary collating sequence to establish the run time environment to install all mainframe products.

3. JOB

Job is a collection of one or more programs submitted to mainframe as a single unit.

4. MULTIPROCESSING

Sharing the execution process by interconnecting more than one microprocessor using tightly or loosely couples technology is called as Multi Processing.

5. PARALLEL PROCESSING

Running more than one application / task concurrently / simultaneously is called as parallel processing.

6. MULTI THREADING

Executing more than one thread (part of a task) parallely using a single processor is called multithreading.

7. TIMESHARING

Switching the processor between two ore more processes by sharing the CPU Time is called as timesharing.

8. TERMINAL

The client machine of a mainframe is called as a terminal which contains a Monitor and Keyboard with a connector. (Ex: 3270)

9. PAGE

The amount of data transferred from Hard Disk to RAM in a single processor fetch.  (Usually 4KB or 32KB)

10. VIRTUAL MEMORY

An amount of area in hard disk that system uses as it were RAM.

11. MVS

MVS is a Virtual Storage technology in which RAM is divided in slots, where each slot is shared by one processor to make the entire virtual memory  available to all users independent of others.

12. LANGUAGE ENVIRONMENT

A common run time environment implemented by IBM to communicate between programs written in different languages. using LE, you can call a C++ function from a COBOL program.

13. BATCH PROCESSING

A Job scheduling environment in which each job is executed one by one depending on the assigned priority.

14. ONLINE PROCESSING

Executing more than one jobs simultaneously by time sharing or multiprocessing is called as online processing.

15. STRUCTURED PROGRAMMING

A computer programming technique which follows top down design approach with block oriented structures.

16. PROCEDURAL PROGRAMMING

A computer programming technique in which the program is divided into modules like function or subroutine or procedure or subprograms.

17. OBJECT ORIENTED PROGRAMMING

A computer programming technique in which the algorithm is implemented based on the objects instead of variable.

18. ISPF

An Interactive menu driven software used in mainframe environment to choose other applications and to type, edit & submit your programs.

19. PRIORITY PROCESSING

Executing the programs based on a numeric value assigned by the programmer / system administrator.

20. BUFFER

A temporary storage area  used to hold the date to reduce the CPU search & fetch time.