Definition: NUMA

(Non-Uniform Memory Access) A multiprocessing architecture in which memory is separated into close and distant banks. NUMA is similar to SMP, in which multiple CPUs share a single memory. However, in SMP, all CPUs access a common memory at the same speed. In NUMA, memory on the same processor board as the CPU (local memory) is accessed faster than memory on other processor boards (shared memory), hence the "non-uniform" nomenclature. As a result, NUMA architecture scales much better to higher numbers of CPUs than SMP. "Cache coherent NUMA" means that caching is supported in the local system.