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 Laboratory. A more typical smaller cluster might have 16 200-MHz (or faster) Intel
P6 processors connected by Fast Ethernet and a Fast Ethernet switch.
As a way to lower cost and increase vendor independency, Beowulf developers often
choose the Linux operating system and use standard message passing protocols
between the computers within the cluster. A Beowulf cluster is placed in the
taxonomy of parallel computing as somewhere below a massively parallel processor
(MPP) and a network of workstations (NOW) that is clustered for the purpose of load
balancing.
4. Epic.
EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing) is a 64-bit microprocessor
instruction set, jointly defined and designed by Hewlett Packard and Intel, that
provides up to 128 general and floating point unit registers and uses speculative
loading, predication, and explicit parallelism to accomplish its computing tasks. By
comparison, current 32-bit CISC and RISC microprocessor architectures depend on
32-bit registers, branch prediction, memory latency, and implicit parallelism, which
are considered a less efficient approach in microarchitecture design.
IA-64 (Intel Architecture-64), Intel's first 64-bit CPU microarchitecture, is based on
EPIC. Intel's first implementation, long expected and well-known as Merced (its code
name), was christened with the Itanium brand name in October, 1999. It is expected
that Itanium-based systems will be compatible with versions of existing and future
operating systems including HP-UX, 64-bit Windows, IA-64 Linux, Project Monterey,
and Novell Modesto.
5. The Norman Conquest
Reasons for William’s invasion of England after Edward’s death.
It was said that king Edward had promised the English throne to William, but the
Witan chose Harold as king. So William led his army to invade England. In October
1066, during the important battle of Hastings, William defeated Harold and killed him.
One Christmas Day, William was crowned king of England, thus beginning the
Norman Conquest of England
The Norman Conquest and its consequences
The Norman Conquest of 1066 is perhaps the best-known event in English history.
William the Conqueror confiscated almost all the land and gave it to his Norman
followers. He replaced the weak Saxon rule with a strong Norman government. So the
feudal system was completely established in England. Relations with the Continent
were opened, and the civilization and commerce were extended. Norman-French
culture, language, manners and architecture were introduced. The Church was brought
