Cougar

• Cougar is the lightweight kernel which is operating on the Teraflop System. This means that many functions which will not be used while doing calculations have been removed from the operating system.
• Cougar and Puma are essentially the same operating system.
• Cougar is the "commercialized" version of Puma which Intel made. Puma was licensed to Intel by Sandia National Labs. Intel then took Puma, added some error code and other features which make it more user friendly, and called it Cougar.
• Cougar's main objective is to make as much of the hardware available to the user; specifically the memory and to optimize the performance of the machine running this operating system.
• Cougar was designed, just as Puma was, to run a massively parallel distributed memory supercomputing system.
• Cougar is run on the Compute Nodes of the Teraflop.

• The T O/S is the full blown operating system which is running on the Teraflop system.
• T O/S stands for the Teraflop Operating System.
• This System was designed to interact with the user so that the rest of the machine can devote itself to working on one problem. 
• This Operating System can be found on the Service Nodes and on the I/O Nodes. These are the nodes which were designated to run a full blown operating system. 
• The user must use this operating system in order to execute any command within the Teraflop.
• All the functionality of the Teraflop resides in the Service Nodes and within this operating system so that the rest of the Teraflop system can focus on its own specialized function without wasting valuable memory.