jargon.artrocity.com
New Hacker's Dictionary the Jargon File v 4.4.6
[scientific computing] Said of a sequence of memory reads and writes to addresses, each of which is separated from the last by a constant interval called the stride length. These can be a worst-case access pattern for the standard memory-caching schemes when the stride length is a multiple of the cache line size. Strided references are often generated by loops through an array, and (if your data is large enough that access-time is significant) it can be worthwhile to tune for better locality by inverting double loops or by partially unrolling the outer loop of a loop nest. This usage is borderline techspeak; the related term memory stride is definitely techspeak.