7. Glossary

Threads

Lightweight processes that share memory and can communicate through memory (via shared global variables)

Hyperthreading

Hardware device duplicating all general and specialized registers (which contain a thread context) and sharing computation elements and data paths to the memory hierarchy. This duplication enables almost instantaneous thread switching, known as physical threads.

Metaprogramming

Generic pre-processing based on "templates", for example, which generate source code sized according to high-level parameters, which is then compiled.

Rendering

In 3D synthesis, it's the result of applying several processes to the geometric input data that describe the virtual world to be projected onto the screen....