英国文学史术语

英国文学史术语

1.The Settlement of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain

The starting date represents the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon invasions, i.e. the invasion/migration of the tribes termed the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes from the northern part of modern Germany to the island of Britain. Similarly, the end-date of the mid-eleventh century centers on the Battle of Hastings (14th October, 1066) which saw the defeat of Harold Godwin son, the last Saxon king, at the hands of William the Conqueror thus transferring control of England to the Normans. Yet this simple cut-off date blurs historical reality. Although Saxon resistance to the Normans post-Hastings was ineffectual, their language did survive developing (influenced, of course, by Norman French) into Middle English (the language of Chaucer).

2.The Old English

Old English refers to the language used in English until the Normans invaded England in 1066.during that period, the English language, as a branch of West Germanic language, was an inflected language. It had strong and weak forms of verbs. Its nouns and adjectives had cases and genders. Word order was not very important in the meaning of the sentences. During this period, a number of Latin words came into the vocabulary as the English people were converted to Christianity.

3.Beowulf

Beowulf is an approach to building a supercomputer as a cluster of commodity

off-the-shelf personal computers, interconnected with a local area network technology like Ethernet, and running programs written for parallel processing. The Beowulf idea is said to enable the average university computer science department or small research company to build its own small supercomputer that can operate in the gigaflop (billions of operations per second) range. In addition to possible cost savings, building your own supercomputer is said to be a learning investment and make you less dependent in the future on particular hardware and software vendors. As off-the-shelf technology evolves, a Beowulf can be upgraded to take advantage of it.

The original Beowulf cluster was developed in 1994 at the Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences (CESDIS), a contractor to the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Thomas Sterling and Don Becker built a cluster computer that consisted of 16 Intel DX4 processors connected by channel-bonded 10 Mbps Ethernet. Their success led to the Beowulf Project, which fosters the development of similar commodity off-the-shelf (COTS) clusters. A number have been developed in universities and research groups, ranging from the original 16-processor Beowulf to Avalon, a cluster of 140 Alpha processors built by the Los Alamos National