Alewife

The alewife (Alosa pseudoharengus) is an anadromous species of herring found in North America. It is one of the "typical" North American shads, attributed to the subgenus Pomolobus of the genus Alosa. As an adult it is a marine species found in the northern West Atlantic Ocean, moving into estuaries before swimming upstream to breed in fresh water habitats, but some populations live entirely in fresh water. It is best known for its invasion of the Great Lakes by using the Welland Canal to bypass Niagara Falls. Here its population surged, peaking between the 1950s and 1980s to the detriment of many native species of fish, and Pacific salmon were introduced to control them. As a marine fish, the alewife is a US National Marine Fisheries Service "Species of Concern".

Description

Alewives reach a maximum length of about 40 centimeters (16 in), but have an average length of about 25 centimeters (10 inches). The front of the body is deep and larger than other fish found in the same waters, and its common name is said to come from comparison with a corpulent female tavernkeeper ("ale-wife").

Alewife (trade)

Alewife, also brewess or brewster, is a historical term for a woman who brewed ale for commercial sale.

Etymology

The word "alewife" is first known to have been used in England in the 15th century and is defined as "a woman who keeps an alehouse." However, the terms 'alewife' and also 'brewster' are used synonymously in the historiography of Medieval England, and the term "alewife" is now commonly used in translations of ancient texts to refer to any woman who brewed and sold ale dating back to the beginning of recorded history.

Background

Although the profession was later taken over by males, the original brewing profession back in ancient Mesopotamia was principally performed by women. Women also brewed the majority of ale for both domestic and commercial use in England before the Black Death, and some women continued brewing into the 17th century. Ale represented a key part of the medieval English diet as it was both the most affordable and clean beverage available. The precise amount of ale that was ingested daily is not known, but it appears to have been up to a gallon a day per person. Because ale went sour within days after being brewed, constant production was necessary to meet demand. Therefore ale was produced in huge quantities using a somewhat simplistic and generally known, although time intensive, process using predominantly malted barley or oats. The ale trade in all of England was predominantly regulated by the Assize of Bread and Ale, "which linked the price of ale to the price of grain and which ordained public checks on the quality of the brew." Operating outside of this regulation was forbidden and handled severely by the courts.

Alewife (multiprocessor)

Alewife was a cache coherent multiprocessor developed in the early 1990s by a group led by Anant Agarwal at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was based on a network of up to 512 processing nodes, each of which used the Sparcle computer architecture, which was formed by modifying a Sun Microsystems SPARC CPU to include the APRIL techniques for fast context switches.

The Alewife project was one of two predecessors cited by the creators of the popular Beowulf cluster multiprocessor.

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