Glossary

This document collects the professional terms and abbreviations used in the Triton-distributed-ascend documentation, organized by category for easy reference.

Compilation and IR

Abbreviation	Full Name	Description
IR	Intermediate Representation	Intermediate representation
AST	Abstract Syntax Tree	Abstract syntax tree
MLIR	Multi-Level Intermediate Representation	Multi-level intermediate representation, an extensible compiler infrastructure in the LLVM ecosystem; both Distributed Dialect and HIVM Dialect are built on top of it
TTIR	Triton IR	Intermediate representation at the Triton dialect level, also the name of a stage in the compilation pipeline
LLVM	(Proper name, no longer corresponds to an acronym expansion)	The target IR / backend infrastructure for the GPU path
HIVM	Ascend backend core IR dialect name	Used as a proper noun in AscendNPU-IR/bishengir code, no official acronym expansion found
DPS	Destination-Passing Style	An IR design pattern that passes computation results through pre-allocated init/output values
CSE	Common Subexpression Elimination	Common subexpression elimination
LICM	Loop-Invariant Code Motion	Loop-invariant code motion
TT_* (e.g., TT_Type/TT_Ptr/TT_IntLike)	Triton Type	Prefix for Triton dialect type constraints in TableGen

Hardware and Execution Units

Abbreviation	Full Name	Description
NPU	Neural Processing Unit	Neural processing unit, referring to Huawei Ascend AI processors in this document
GPU	Graphics Processing Unit	Graphics processing unit
GM	Global Memory	Global memory, device-side globally addressable memory
UB	Unified Buffer	Unified buffer, AICore on-chip temporary buffer
AIC	AI Cube Core	Matrix unit, responsible for matrix operations
AIV	AI Vector Core	Vector unit, responsible for vector computation and low-latency communication
PE	Processing Element	Processing element, corresponding to a rank / process / device participant

Communication Engines and Protocols

Abbreviation	Full Name	Description
SHMEM	Symmetric Hierarchical Memory / Shared Memory	Symmetric memory communication library, referring to shmem/aclshmem symmetric heap communication library in this document
ACLSHMEM	Combination of ACL (AscendCL) and SHMEM	Prefix naming for symmetric heap communication interfaces/symbols in this document
MTE	Memory Transfer Engine	Memory transfer engine, data movement engine on Ascend AICore side
SDMA	System Direct Memory Access	System direct memory access
UDMA	UB Direct Memory Access	Unified direct memory access
RDMA	Remote Direct Memory Access	Remote direct memory access
RoCE / ROCE	RDMA over Converged Ethernet	RDMA over converged Ethernet
TLS	Transport Layer Security	Transport layer security protocol
QP	Queue Pair	Queue pair
SQ	Send Queue	Send queue
SQE	Send Queue Element	Send queue element
WQE	Work Queue Element	Work queue element
SGE	Scatter/Gather Element	Scatter/gather element

Other

Abbreviation	Full Name	Description
SIMD	Single Instruction Multiple Data	Single instruction multiple data
SDK	Software Development Kit	Software development kit