A node is the name of a computer. The computer may be an IBM PC, a workstation, a mini, a mainframe, or a supercomputer. An Internet node can be any machine in the world, as long as it is on the Internet network, which NRC is a member (the Internet is discussed in the Networking section of part II of the course notes).
The convention for a node on the Internet network is:
machine.section.organization.type_of_organizationwhere type_of_organization may be edu, mil, gov, com, org, net or, outside of the United States, country_code.
At the National Research Council, a node is defined as
machine.institute.nrc.caThe Scientific Computing Support Group's SGI Indy is nickel.sao.nrc.ca for the outside world, nickel.sao for people within NRC and and nickel for people within SAO/SCSG.