Anglo-Saxon poem (composed c. 700), the only complete surviving example of Germanic folk epic. It exists in a single manuscript copied in England about 1000 in the Cottonian collection of the British Museum.

Name for a class of virtual supercomputer created by linking numerous PCs through network connections into a single high-performance unit based on inexpensive, x86-based hardware and publicly available software, such as some versions of UNIX. This clustering technique can provide performance comparable to a traditional supercomputer at approximately 10 percent of the cost. The first Beowulf cluster was assembled at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in 1994. The origin of the name comes from Beowulf, the hero who fought and killed the monster Grendel in an eighth-century Old English saga.