Chunk (information)

A chunk is a fragment of information which is used in many multimedia formats, such as PNG, MP3

MP3

MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...

 and AVI

Audio Video Interleave

Audio Video Interleave , known by its acronym AVI, is a multimedia container format introduced by Microsoft in November 1992 as part of its Video for Windows technology. AVI files can contain both audio and video data in a file container that allows synchronous audio-with-video playback...

.

Each chunk contains a header which indicates some parameters (e.g. the type of chunk, comments, size etc.) In the middle there is a variable area containing data which are decoded by the program from the parameters in the header.

Chunks may also be fragments of information which are downloaded or managed by P2P

Peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...

programs.

In distributed computing, a chunk is a set of data which are sent to a processor or one of the parts of a computer for processing. For example a sub-set of rows of a matrix.