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Close to Metal
Close to Metal (CTM) was a low-level hardware programming interface introduced by AMD in 2006, letting developers use ATI GPUs for general-purpose computation rather than graphics.
Close-range photogrammetry
Close-range photogrammetry is a non-contact measurement technique that derives precise 3D coordinates from photographs taken at short distances, used in industrial metrology, structural monitoring, cultural heritage, medicine, and forensics.
Close-spaced sublimation
Close-spaced sublimation is a physical vapor deposition technique in which a solid source and substrate sit close together in rough vacuum, best known for thin-film solar cells.
Closed Brayton cycle
A closed Brayton cycle is a gas-turbine cycle in which the working fluid recirculates in a sealed loop, applied to nuclear, solar, and space power.
Closed captioning
Closed captioning is toggleable on-screen text conveying a program's dialogue, speakers, and sounds, written mainly for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers and first tested in 1973.
Closed fuel cycle
A closed fuel cycle is a nuclear fuel strategy that reprocesses spent reactor fuel to recover uranium and plutonium for reuse, contrasting with the open once-through cycle.
Closed-circuit television
Closed-circuit television (CCTV) is the use of video cameras to send a signal to a limited set of monitors, most often for surveillance and security.
Closed-loop geothermal systems
Closed-loop geothermal systems (CLGS) harvest heat from hot rock through sealed tubing, requiring no aquifer or fracking; the first commercial plant, Eavor-Loop at Geretsried, Germany, began delivering power in December 2025.
Closed-loop stepper motor
A closed-loop stepper motor is a stepper motor paired with an encoder whose feedback prevents lost steps and improves accuracy, also marketed as a stepper servo or hybrid servo.
Closed-loop supply chain
A closed-loop supply chain is a supply chain that includes reverse flows of used products returning to the manufacturer after consumer use, such as returns, leasing, and remanufacturing.
Clostridium ljungdahlii
Clostridium ljungdahlii is an anaerobic, rod-shaped acetogenic bacterium, first described in 1993, that converts synthesis gas mainly into acetate and ethanol. It was the first bacterium discovered to metabolize syngas components and produce ethanol.
Closure (computer programming)
In programming, a closure, also called a lexical or function closure, is a function bundled with its surrounding lexical environment, letting it access outer variables after that scope has finished executing.
Cloth modeling
Cloth modeling is the branch of computer graphics and computational mechanics that simulates fabric and garments, used for animated clothing in film, games, and fashion design.
Clothes dryer
A clothes dryer, or tumble dryer, is a household appliance that dries washed clothes by tumbling them in a drum while heated air carries moisture away.
Clothes drying cabinet
A clothes drying cabinet (Swedish torkskåp) is a laundry appliance where clothes hang still on hangers while heated air circulates, instead of tumbling in a drum.
Clothes iron
A clothes iron, or electric iron, is a handheld appliance with a heated soleplate that presses wrinkles out of fabric; most modern irons also produce steam.
Clothes line
A clothes line, or washing line, is a rope or wire stretched between two points on which washed clothes are hung to dry in the open air.
ClothOff
ClothOff is a web and smartphone "nudify" application that uses generative AI to produce non-consensual fake nude images of real people, mostly women and girls.
Clothoid path planning
Clothoid path planning builds vehicle paths from clothoid curves whose curvature varies linearly with arc length, giving continuous curvature that car-like vehicles can follow without stopping.
Clotilda (slave ship)
The Clotilda was a schooner that in 1860 carried out the last known slave trading voyage to the United States, landing 110 captives near Mobile, Alabama.
CLOUD Act
The CLOUD Act (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act) is a 2018 US law requiring providers to turn over data regardless of where it is stored.
Cloud computing
Cloud computing, also called cloud-based computing, delivers on-demand network access to shared computing resources like servers, storage, and applications, rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort.
Cloud computing security
Cloud computing security, also known as cloud security, is the set of policies, technologies, and controls that protect data, applications, and infrastructure in cloud computing, where responsibility is shared between provider and customer.
Cloud Controls Matrix
The Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM) is a cybersecurity control framework for cloud computing published by the Cloud Security Alliance, with 207 controls across 17 security domains.
Cloud data warehouse
Cloud data warehouse: a managed cloud service for storing and analyzing structured and semi-structured data (also called enterprise data warehouse, EDW). Key traits: elastic storage-compute separation, MPP and columnar stores, ETL/ELT ingestion, usage-based pricing; began with Amazon Redshift in 2012, now led by Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Redshift.
Cloud database
A cloud database is a database deployed, delivered, and accessed through a cloud computing platform rather than on-premises hardware, either self-managed on a cloud virtual machine or consumed as a managed database-as-a-service.
Cloud Firestore
Cloud Firestore is a serverless NoSQL document database from Google, offered through Firebase and Google Cloud Platform, that syncs data in real time to mobile and web clients.
Cloud Foundry
Cloud Foundry is an open-source platform as a service, created at VMware in 2009, where developers push applications and the platform handles packaging, routing, and scaling.
Cloud model (uncertainty reasoning)
The cloud model is a computational intelligence method, formulated by Deyi Li and colleagues, that converts between qualitative concepts and quantitative data while treating fuzziness and randomness together.
Cloud Native Computing Foundation
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), founded in 2015 under the Linux Foundation, hosts open source cloud native projects including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and OpenTelemetry, with over 300,000 contributors.