A Partition is storage space on a hard drive. A hard disk can have multiple partitions thus dividing the hard drive into multiple “virtual” hard drives. It can also have only one partition using the entire disk or a part thus having unused portion of the hard drive.

For keyword 1 I discussed what a partition is, however a partition by itself is useless. It needs a File System. A file system is what we use to organize data on the partitioned hard drive. The file system retains the data on the hard drive and allows the data to be retrieved and updated. The file system also allows for managing the physical space on the hard drive.

• NOTE: although I have emphasized hard drive in my definitions, partitions and file sy stems are actually used on many devices including floppy drives, optical discs and flash drives.

There are many types of file systems, Unix based systems typically use ext4 and windows uses NTFS. From the user point of view they do the same t hing they just have different means of managing the partition and all its data.

An *Operating System is a program or a series of programs and applications that runs your computer. It is the most important type of software on a system. It gives users the ability to interact with the system by running applications and accessing system devices. Windows is an example of an operating system, a graphical one to more specific. This gives the user the ability to access the systems resources to “do” various things. Examples being accessing the internet, playing games, sending data to a printer.

When a computer system is first turned on there is no operating system in the ROM or RAM(read only memory, and random access memory). The bootstrap loader is a small program that is stored in rom or on the first sector of the harddrive. The bootloader has the instructions needed to load any operating system stored on the hard drive.

• Network Services are pieces of software hosted by a server that give functionality and shared resources to users on a network. E-mail and file sharing are two common network services.

• System administration, in its simplest terms, is the upkeep of a computer system or network. The person who maintains the system or network is typically called a system administrator. The duties of a system administrator to maintain the system or network to company specifications varies depending on the company. The most important aspect of system administration is critical thinking and problem solving. This will come in handy when troubleshooting a unique problem under time constraints. Common system administration duties include: log checking, OS updating, hardware updates, security updates and backups.

• Backup is defined, in computer science, as the process of making copies of data to be used to restore the original if it is ever lost or damaged. Backing up data is a very important aspect of the computer science world as loss of data is quite common. When dealing with multiple systems and/or networks trying to back up everything can be quite the challenge but there are many ways it can be accomplished. One good example is scheduling a time when system resource usage is typically at its lowest and automatically copying the contents of directories deemed critical to an offsite server.

• In computer science Virtualization is defined as is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something. Hardware platforms, operating systems, storage devices and network resources can all be virtualized. The most common form of virtualization is server virtualization in which one physical server is partitioned into several virtual serves that can interact independently with devices and applications as if it were a separate resource. The virtual machine manager(VMM) is a common software package used in virtualization. It manages multiple operating systems, or instances of the same, on a single system. It manages all the systems resources and allocates what is needed based on what resources each operating system needs.

• High Performance Computing can be defined as, the use of powerful processors, networks and supercomputers to tackle problems that are very compute or data-intensive. As technology continues to advance access to high powered technology, such as a supercomputer with a powerful processor, becomes more commonplace. This has caused a boom in High performance computing as HPC is widely used in a range of areas of science, engineering and industry such as climate research, aerospace and automotive engineering, oil exploration, drug design, genetic sequencing and nanotechnology.