lf), oldest English epic, probably composed in the early 8th cent. by an Anglian bard in the vicinity of Northumbria. It survives in only one manuscript, written c.A.D. 1000 by two scribes and preserved in the British Museum in the collection of Sir Robert Cotton. The materials for the poem are derived mainly from Scandinavian history, folk tale, and mythology. Its narrative consists of two parts: The first relates Beowulf's successful fights with the water monster Grendel and with Grendel's mother; the second narrates the hero's victory in his old age over a dragon and his subsequent death and funeral at the end of a long life of honor. These events take place entirely in Denmark and Sweden. The poem contains a remarkable fusion of pagan and Christian elements and provides a vivid picture of old Germanic life. It is written in a strongly accentual, alliterative verse. There have been some 65 translations of the work into modern English; one of the most accomplished is by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney Heaney, Seamus (shā`məs hē`nē), 1939–, Irish poet, b. Londonderry (now Derry), Northern Ireland...... Click the link for more information. (2000).
Bibliography
See The Beowulf Poet: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by D. K. Fry (1968); studies by K. Sisam (1965), J. C. Pope (rev. ed. 1966), E. B. Irving (1968), R. Girvan and R. Bruce-Mitford (1971), K. S. Kiernan (1981), W. F. Bolston (1982), and J. D. Ogilvy and D. C. Baker (1986).
Beowulf
Heroic poem considered the highest achievement of Old English literature and the earliest European vernacular epic. It deals with events of the early 6th century and was probably composed c. 700–750. It tells the story of the Scandinavian hero Beowulf, who gains fame as a young man by vanquishing the monster Grendel and Grendel's mother; later, as an aging king, he kills a dragon but dies soon after, honoured and lamented. Beowulf belongs metrically, stylistically, and thematically to the Germanic heroic tradition but shows a distinct Christian influence.
Beowulf
Using several small computers to provide the computing power of one large computer. A Beowulf cluster uses several off-the-shelf PCs connected via Ethernet to solve problems that would normally be handled by a supercomputer. Designed for high speed rather than redundancy, the first Beowulf system was developed by a contractor to NASA in the mid-1990s.
Unix Based
Unix variants such as Linux and FreeBSD are typically used as the operating system in a Beowulf cluster, and parallel operation is provided by available software in the Unix community that manages message passing and memory. Access to a particular PC in a cluster is provided by Telnetting to the machine over the network, as most of the PCs in the cluster do not have display adapters.
In order to run effectively in a Beowulf cluster, applications must be able to split the data into parallel chunks that can be acted upon simultaneously. See Telnet, NOW project and Millennium project.
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