4. Cylc Terminology

4.1. Jobs and Tasks

A job is a program or script that runs on a computer, and a task is a workflow abstraction - a node in the suite dependency graph - that represents a job.

4.2. Cycle Points

A cycle point is a particular date-time (or integer) point in a sequence of date-time (or integer) points. Each cylc task has a private cycle point and can advance independently to subsequent cycle points. It may sometimes be convenient, however, to refer to the “current cycle point” of a suite (or the previous or next one, etc.) with reference to a particular task, or in the sense of all tasks instances that “belong to” a particular cycle point. But keep in mind that different tasks may pass through the “current cycle point” (etc.) at different times as the suite evolves.