Bare Metal
Noun · Hacker Culture
Definitions
A physical server or computer used directly without a hypervisor, virtual machine, or container abstraction layer, giving the workload exclusive access to the underlying hardware. Chosen for performance-critical applications where virtualization overhead, noisy-neighbor effects, or hardware-level access (GPUs, FPGAs, specific CPU features) matter.
In plain English: Running software directly on a physical computer rather than inside a virtual machine or cloud container, for maximum performance.
Example: "We moved the ML training jobs to bare metal because the GPU passthrough latency on VMs was killing our throughput."