Kraken

The Kraken (/ˈkreɪkən/ or /ˈkrɑːkən/) is a legendary sea monster of giant size that is said to dwell off the coasts of Norway and Greenland. A number of authors over the years have postulated that the legend originated from sightings of giant squids that may grow to 12-15 meters (40-50 feet) in length, despite the fact that the creature in the original tales was not described as having tentacles and more closely resembled a whale or crab. The sheer size and fearsome appearance attributed to the kraken have made it a common ocean-dwelling monster in various fictional works.

Etymology

The English word kraken is taken from Norwegian. In Norwegian and Swedish, Kraken is the definite form of krake, a word designating an unhealthy animal or something twisted (cognate with the English crook and crank). In modern German, Krake (plural and declined singular: Kraken) means octopus, but can also refer to the legendary kraken.

History

In the late-13th-century version of the Old Icelandic saga Örvar-Oddr is an inserted episode of a journey bound for Helluland (Baffin Island) which takes the protagonists through the Greenland Sea, and here they spot two massive sea-monsters called Hafgufa ("sea mist") and Lyngbakr ("heather-back"). The hafgufa is believed to be a reference to the kraken:

Browser speed test

A browser speed test is a computer benchmark that scores the performance of a web browser, by measuring the browser's efficiency in completing a predefined list of tasks. In general the testing software is available online, located on a website, where different algorithms are loaded and performed in the browser client. Typical test tasks are rendering and animation, DOM transformations, string operations, mathematical calculations, sorting algorithms, graphic performance tests and memory instructions. Browser speed tests have been used during browser wars to prove superiority of specific web browsers. The popular Acid3 test is no particular speed test but checks browser conformity to web standards (though it checks whether a general performance goal is met or not).

General tests

Peacekeeper

Online speed test by Futuremark, mainly using rendering, mathematical and memory operations. Takes approx. 5 minutes for execution and tells results of other browsers with different CPUs. Does not respect operating system.

Kraken (novel)

Kraken is a fantasy novel by British author China Miéville. It is published in the UK by Macmillan, and in the US by Del Rey Books. The book bears the subtitle "An Anatomy" on the title page. It was the winner for the 2011 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel.

Miéville has described the book as "a dark comedy about a squid-worshipping cult and the end of the world. It takes the idea of the squid cult very seriously. Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they’re not absurd."

Plot

An inexplicable event has occurred at the Natural History Museum, London — a forty foot specimen of giant squid in formalin has disappeared overnight. Additionally, a murder victim is found folded into a glass bottle. Various groups are interested in getting the squid back, including a naive staff member, a secret squad of London police, assorted religious cults, and various supernatural and mostly dead criminal elements. The wondrous squid represents deity to the Church of Kraken Almighty. Did they liberate their god, or could it have been stolen by a rival cult? The only thing that all agree upon is that the fate of this embalmed kraken is intimately tied to the End of the World.

Kraken (Pirates of the Caribbean)

The Kraken is a fictional sea monster in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series. The monster made its first appearance in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest as an antagonist portrayed through computer-generated imagery (CGI). Although a creation of Industrial Light & Magic for Dead Man's Chest and designed by the film's producers, this Kraken derives from the eponymous mythical creature.Walt Disney Pictures also became the first studio to produce this creature using CGI. The Kraken makes a small, symbolic appearance in the third film in the series, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.

In the films, the Kraken is a sea creature of monstrous proportions, controlled by Davy Jones, often to destroy ships that threaten him. Various pronunciations are made of the name: Kevin McNally (Mr. Gibbs) pronounced it /ˈkrækən/ KRAK-ən, so that pronunciation was adopted on the set. In Dead Man's Chest and At World's End, Jack refers to the Kraken as 'beastie'.

Kraken (Dungeons & Dragons)

In the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game, the kraken is a large, ocean-dwelling magical beast. It is akin to a squid the size of a house. It is almost 80 feet long and 60 feet tall and wide. Its body is similar to that of a squid, with a ring of tentacles surrounding a mouth connected to a conical central body. Two of its 10 tentacles are longer than the rest, and bear deadly barbs. The kraken has very large eyes, and fins protrude from the upper part of its elongated central body.

Publication history

The kraken appeared in the first edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in the original Monster Manual II (1983).

The kraken appeared in the Dungeons & Dragons Creature Catalogue (1986), and the Creature Catalog (1993).

The kraken appeared in the second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in the Monstrous Compendium Volume Two (1989), under the "squid, giant" entry, and reprinted in the Monstrous Manual (1993). The Zakharan kraken of the Al-Qadim setting appeared in Dragon #198 (October 1993).

Kraken (supercomputer)

Kraken was a Cray XT5 supercomputer that entered into full production mode on February 2, 2009. Kraken was operated by the University of Tennessee and was the most powerful computer in the world managed by academia at the time. It was housed in the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Kraken was decommissioned on April 30, 2014.

History

Kraken's history began in 1991 with the establishment of the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences (JICS), a joint venture between the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The JICS facility, the UT campus building in which JICS is housed, is one of the only state-owned buildings ever built on the campus of a national laboratory. The main goals of JICS are to create new ways to simulate and model data using supercomputers and to train future engineers and scientists on the use of these techniques.

The next major event in the establishment of Kraken occurred in the Spring of 2008 when the National Science Foundation awarded the University of Tennessee a $65 million grant to build and operate a supercomputer in order to aid public research in academia; the grant provided $30 million for the hardware and $35 million for the operation of the system. The supercomputer was housed at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and managed by the University of Tennessee's National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS).