Pile

Pile may refer to:

Energy

Architecture

Data processing

People

Places

Nuclear reactor

A nuclear reactor, formerly known as an atomic pile, is a device used to initiate and control a sustained nuclear chain reaction. Nuclear reactors are used at nuclear power plants for electricity generation and in propulsion of ships. Heat from nuclear fission is passed to a working fluid (water or gas), which runs through turbines. These either drive a ship's propellers or turn electrical generators. Nuclear generated steam in principle can be used for industrial process heat or for district heating. Some reactors are used to produce isotopes for medical and industrial use, or for production of weapons-grade plutonium. Some are run only for research. Today there are about 450 nuclear power reactors that are used to generate electricity in about 30 countries around the world.

Mechanism

Just as conventional power-stations generate electricity by harnessing the thermal energy released from burning fossil fuels, nuclear reactors convert the energy released by controlled nuclear fission into thermal energy for further conversion to mechanical or electrical forms.

Pile (abstract data type)

In computer science, a pile is an abstract data type for storing data in a loosely ordered way. There are two different usages of the term; one refers to an ordered deque, the other to an improved heap.

Ordered deque

The first version combines the properties of the deque and a priority queue and may be described as an ordered deque.

An item may be added to the head of the list if the new item is valued less than or equal to the current head or to the tail of the list if the new item is greater than or equal to the current tail. Elements may be removed from both the head and the tail.

Piles of this kind are used in the "UnShuffle sort" sorting algorithm.

Improved heap

The second version is a subject of patents and improves the heap data structure.

The whole Data Pile-based system can be generalized as shown:

References