The art or science of building; especially, the art of building houses, churches, bridges, and other structures, for the purposes of civil life; -- often called civil architecture.

Construction, in a more general sense; frame or structure; workmanship.

The design and style of buildings.

The art and science of designing buildings. Another word to describe specific styles of buildings. For example, modern architecture is the style of a group of buildings.

An overarching framework that allows individual ITS services and technologies to work together, share information, and yield synergistic benefits. The National ITS Architecture was released as a final document in June 1996.

A framework for organizing the planning and implementation of data resources. The set of data, processes, and technologies that an enterprise has selected for the creation and operation of information systems. The blueprint that describes the environment that the data warehouse, analysis application, or operational system is built.

a blueprint and set of guidelines for doing this

a blueprint for how to place resources optimally in the IT environment to support business, and security is a critical component

identifies the requirements and applications of a network.

a federate platform of the various mechanisms of distribution

an ideal platform for applications where availability is essential for business continuity, such as in network security

The way something is built. Network architecture refers to the various ways a network can be put together or implemented.

neutral A buzzword applied to Sun's Java programming language that is meant to imply its ability to execute under a number of computer architectures without requiring recompilation or code changes.

Microcontrollers based on the Harvard Architecture have separate data and instruction busses. This allows execution instructions to occur in parallel. As an instruction is being "pre-fetched", the instruction is executing on the data bus. Once the current instruction is complete, the next instruction is ready. This pre-fetch theoretically allows for much faster execution than a Von-Neuman architecture, but a certain amount of added silicon complexity exists. The PPC 405 core is built on Harvard architecture. Microcontrollers based on the Von-Neuman architecture have a single "data" bus that is used to fetch both instructions and data. Program instructions and data are stored in a common main memory. When such a controller addresses main memory, it first fetches an instruction, then fetches the data to support the instruction. The two separate fetches slow down the controller's operation.

(As applied to computers), the structured organization of elements in a computational mechanism -- for example, the difference between sequential processing and parallel distributed processing machines is said to be a difference in architecture. See also Computation, (non-) von Neumann Architecture.