Fencing

Fencing, also called Olympic fencing emerged as a competitive sport at the end of the 19th century, with the Italian school having modified the "classical fencing", and the French school having later refined the Italian system.

Modern fencing uses three weapons, and so is divided respectively into three competitive scenes: foil, sabre (spelt "saber" in the United States) and épée. Most (but not all) competitive fencers choose to specialise in one of these only.

Competitive fencing is one of five activities which have been featured in every one of the modern Olympic Games, the other four being athletics, cycling, swimming, and gymnastics.

Competitive fencing

Governing body

Fencing is governed by Fédération Internationale d'Escrime or FIE. Today, its head office is in Lausanne, Switzerland. The FIE is composed of 145 national federations, each of which is recognised by its country's Olympic Committee as the sole representative of Olympic-style fencing in that country.

Rules

The FIE maintains the current rules used for FIE sanctioned international events, including world cups, world championships and the Olympic Games. The FIE handles proposals to change the rules the first year after an Olympic year in the annual congress. The US Fencing Association has slightly different rules, but usually adhere to FIE standards.

Fencing (computing)

Fencing is the process of isolating a node of a computer cluster or protecting shared resources when a node appears to be malfunctioning.

As the number of nodes in a cluster increases, so does the likelihood that one of them may fail at some point. The failed node may have control over shared resources that need to be reclaimed and if the node is acting erratically, the rest of the system needs to be protected. Fencing may thus either disable the node, or disallow shared storage access, thus ensuring data integrity.

Basic concepts

A node fence (or I/O fence) is a virtual "fence" that separates nodes which may have access to a shared resource from nodes which must not. It may separate an active node from its backup. If the backup crosses the fence and, for example, tries to control the same disk array as the primary, a data hazard may occur. Mechanisms such as STONITH are designed to prevent this condition.

Isolating a node means ensuring that I/O can no longer be done from it. Fencing is typically done automatically, by cluster infrastructure such as shared disk file systems, in order to protect processes from other active nodes modifying the resources during node failures. Mechanisms to support fencing, such as the reserve/release mechanism of SCSI, have existed since at least 1985.

Fence (disambiguation)

A fence a barrier enclosing or bordering a field, yard, etc., usually made of posts and wire or wood, used to prevent entrance, to confine, or to mark a boundary.

Fence may also refer to:

Science and technology

Computing

Entertainment