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Plan 9 Running on Blue Gene
gholmer writes "Eric Van Hensbergen reports that Plan 9 has been successfully booted on IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer. A live demo will be attempted during a poster session at this year's Usenix. There is also the obligatory Space Glenda picture."
It will be running "Duke Nukem Forever".
Can it run Vista?
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
"Plan 9?
Ah, yes. Plan 9 deals with the resurrection of the dead. Long distance electrodes shot into the pineal and pituitary gland of the recently dead."
That's pretty cool to think about since I didn't know if Plan 9 is still used or not beyond research environments. Or even developed for. Also I was beginning to think Slashdot was dying since I hardly come here anymore, but with news like this I feel mistaken.. Pretty cool!
Am I the only one that was wondering why Plan 9 Pulishing (http://www.plan9.org/) would need to be run on Blue Gene?
Is this a going concern? Do lots of people use this?
What happened to Plans 1-8? And could you make a module that corrupts the output, and call it Plan B? I think it may be a little too early to grasp exactly what the story is here. Where's my caffeine?
Forget Vista, can it cook toast? Without burning it?
This sig left intentionally blank.
i just knew they use them to watch bad movies. or even better.. porn with a million Teraflops???
...about how I am so l33t and my linux runs on a 386 with 4 meg o RAM? Isn't this the extreme opposite of those posts, using a stupid fast computer to run a tight little OS (probably thinks it's a screensaver)? Well somebody's compensating for something in the hallowed hallways of IBM...
I'm not buying a Blue Gene until they port AmigaOS to it, like God intended.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Plan 9 looks to me like the perennial contender for something which is never to be released; much like the HURD (although I think the HURD is more like a search in the wrong direction altogether; I mean, if you're going to do it all afresh - why use UNIX ?). I imagine a bunch of Wozniaks tinkering about all day without any impatient Jobses looking over their shoulder scheming to make a buck. Then I read their website again, and I knew for sure they must be out of their minds at bit: THEY BROUGHT ALONG 'ED' !!
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Stupid! Stupid!
When you've got solamanite, you've got nothing!
(Yeah, its one of my fave movies)
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Sorry but it's not really clear what it all implies. Could someone explain?
You just got troll'd!
The graphical programs displayed are: the mail announcer faces(1), the system statistics watcher stats(8), the text editor acme(1), the sky catalog scat(1), the image viewer
I'm not sure I'm ready to check out any "graphical" items called scat.
That is, if you look at the source. Man, for such a simple page they sure use an enormous amount of tage. If this is what the future looks like, I want the past back !
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
From the plan9 page: "... it does not require source code to be distributed with derived works; it is non-viral."
Do people really need to say "non-viral"? Does this add information, or is it an attack on the GPL?
licences are not alive.
Or is the copyright on Microsoft code "viral" as well? Derivations are restricted the same as the original.
Considering some of the low power hardware that NetBSD has been ported to, I am sure that a top of the line IBM super computer should have no trouble handling it :)
Don't judge a book by its cover. The current generation of flashy-looking OS's are excellent for computers with a small number of CPU cores and uniform memory, but they are really poor for machines with many cores and core-local memory. Plan 9 is designed to work as a distributed OS, which is perfect for Blue Gene, and it will probably become more and more relevant to home computing as we move towards PCs with thousands of CPU cores, because we'll need a decent distributed OS to make use of them. The mid-80s "FVWM" look is just because it is a research OS and the researchers have better things to do than port KDE.
With the added power of Bluegene, the Bell Labs team will now be able to add more then on colour to their GUI.
I was wondering if Plan 9 integrates all peripherals through the file system, wouldn't it be easier to do system calls in pure functional languages, without the need for side effects? I guess it would be possible to program a complete program of any sort in a purely functional language such as Haskell. Does anyone know something about this? My interest is purely academic though, as i don't have any plans for plan 9.
"Well , cutting edge for 1990. If thats the best it can do on a supercomputer it doesn't bode well for your average PC!"
Super computers don't run GUIs. That is for visualization workstations.
"Has it broken any new ground with any new operating paradigms? (Thats a genuine question , I don't know)."
Yes I suggest you go learn a lot more about it before posting in blatant ignorance.
Plan 9 is a distributed operating system. It uses clusters of servers to act as application servers, storage servers, and IO servers. It is ideal for clustered systems with hundreds or thousands of cores! Guess what Blue Genie is?
Supercomputers usually lack a traditional gui. They depend on workstations to handle any visual interface. They are all about speed and nothing else. Your comment about a less than pretty GUI on a supercomputer is about as useful as complaining about the crappy stereo in a formula one car.
Is Plan 9 important? Well since it looks as if cores are going to start multiplying at a Moore's law like rate then the answer is most likely yes.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"Has it broken any new ground with any new operating paradigms? (Thats a genuine question , I don't know). I do wonder why thety bother and don't just try and integrate any new ways of thinking they've come up with into pre-existing systems such as Linux or BSD."
Well, yes. Read the overview
-mls
The WHOLE POINT of Blue Gene is to do intellectual exercises. It's a RESEARCH computer.
Currently hooked on AMP
Blue Gene is a very specialized supercomputer designed with a customized 'OS' (if you can even call it that!) which minimizes any sort of interrupts and other nonsense such as typical OS stuff because when you're scaling out to 65,536 nodes on an MPI-based code which requires lock-step synchronization, you can't afford for some unimportant process on a single node to cause small delays. Plan 9 IS a research oddity on the system in this regard, and not the sort of thing you'll see anyone putting on a BG/L for what it was intended to do.
(This doesn't mean you won't see it eventually if someone has way, way too much money to burn - after all, the PS3 is designed for games, but some people are experimenting with them for computation - but let's not get carried away. The point is, BG/L is not the sort of system that Plan 9 would be targeted at.)
"your tourettes-like thoughts to yourself "
You were the one who swore sonny , though I suspect you don't even know what Tourettes is but you just heard it somewhere and thought it sounded cool.
"Perhaps while we're doing that, you could follow some of the links on the article and educate yourself about Plan9?"
Been there done that. I still don't see its point.
...turn it into a Sinclair ZX81 to prove that it can be done?
What's next? ReactOS on a Cray?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
"It's a RESEARCH computer"
Its for researching problems using a computer. Its not generally for research computing issues themselves.
"Plan 9 is a distributed operating system. It uses clusters of servers to act as application servers, storage servers, and IO servers. It is ideal for clustered systems with hundreds or thousands of cores!"
Yeah , distributed OS. Nice buzzphrase but means bugger all. An OS is by definition the software than runs the hardware its executing on via the CPU and controls access to resources by application programs to that CPU. Therefor a "distributed" OS is nothing more than a whole load of seperate OSes heavily linked by RPC style calls. I'm sure it sounds cool in powerpoint presentations however.
I do wonder why thety bother and don't just try and integrate any new ways of thinking they've come up with into pre-existing systems such as Linux or BSD.
Why would they put a 16 year old consumer-oriented, x86-based, single processor-optimized operating system on a distributed supercomputer? I dunno, maybe they're just a little dim.
You were the one who swore sonny , though I suspect you don't even know what Tourettes is but you just heard it somewhere and thought it sounded cool.
Yeah, and I have the sunglasses and leather jacket to go with it.
I bet you think Torettes is just characterised by uncontrollable swearing, don't you?
Been there done that. I still don't see its point.
Oh so you are just a common idiot then? Thanks for clearing that up.
The whole purpose of the project is to research new ideas which make their way into production operating systems. "Slowly, ideas from Plan 9 are being adopted by other systems. Plan 9 was the first operating system with complete support for the UTF-8 Unicode character set encoding. The dump file system has been mimicked in Athena's OldFiles directories or Network Appliance's .snapshot directories. The flexible rfork(2) system call, the basis of lightweight threads, was adopted as is by the various BSD derivatives and reincarnated on Linux as clone(2). The simple file protocol 9P has been implemented on early versions of FreeBSD and current versions of Linux."
Plan 9 is a radically distributed OS. It was written from conception as a distributed kernel, and all aspects of the OS are distributed in ways that Linux/Unix/Windows are not. It may be older, but it embraces many distributed paradigms that few OS's in production can handle. Because it is so distributed, the many common utils are simply not compatible with the kernel without a ground-up rewrite. Emacs Emacs, X, KDE, Gnome are not ported and probably won't be. Here's a naive review: http://www.osnews.com/story.php/15235/Investigatin g-the-Plan-9-Operating-System
I'm sure Plan 9 is an interesting intellectual exercise for the people involved, but other than that , what exactly is its point?
The point is to make distributed computation a whole lot simpler than it is right now.
I do wonder why thety bother and don't just try and integrate any new ways of thinking they've come up with into pre-existing systems such as Linux or BSD.
They do try, and they have succeeded to some degree.
But that's fraught with its own problems; for example, few if any Linux programs will know anything about 9P or naming or any of that.
if thats the case its the longest coming in history
"that's", "case, then", "it's". (And if you think that it's the longest coming in history, then you don't watch enough porn.)
Its for researching problems using a computer. Its not generally for research computing issues themselves.
What is the difference? Is computer science not "science?"
But BG/L is exactly the type of hardware that Plan 9 is designed for.
Plan 9 could allow Blue Gene to be used for different problems than it is currently being used for. Yes it is currently are research project but it is far from a waste of time.
I disagree that BG/L isn't the type of system that Plan 9 is targeted at. The current problem set that BG/L is being used for isn't one that Plan 9 is a good tool for. The hardware probably isn't ideal but it is close enough for useful research.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Therefor a "distributed" OS is nothing more than a whole load of seperate OSes heavily linked by RPC style calls.
Yes, that's right. However, some OSs are better at that type of call than others. In some "non-distributed" OSs, for example, there is a higher overhead for RPC calls due to a large number of transitions between system and user space. With sufficient hacking, any OS could work on Blue Gene, but it makes sense to go for a OS that is already optimised for Blue Gene-like platforms.
I see your point that it's a buzzword, but generally speaking, most technology can be described as a special case of a previous technology. An OS is nothing more than an application that provides a virtual machine. A virtual machine is nothing more than a software-controlled representation of an actual CPU. A CPU is nothing more than an adding machine connected to a finite state machine. A finite state machine is nothing more than a special type of logic circuit. We assign new labels, like "CPU" and "OS", because the special case has a new property that is useful to us.
Oh sorry Professor, I don't think any of us realised it was you! Now I feel silly. Well, thanks for clearing that up!
P.S: When is your next peer-reviewed Computer Science paper due to be published? I'm eager to read more of your insight, as always! Will you be presenting at any conferences this year? I bet Ken Thompson and Rob Pike won't be able to look you in the eye now you've so devastatingly destroyed their "research"!
I don't know about Plan9, but QNX does in fact use RPC style calls to implement its distributed functionality. What makes QNX "distributed" compared to non-distributed operating system with RPC grafted on top is that for the programmer, there is no difference between using a local resource or a resource on a different machine in the distributed system - both use the exact same APIs. This is seriously cool if you intend to run on a cluster of machines (like a modern supercomputer, for example), because you don't need middleware layers like MPI or PVM.
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi and Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like, 'C-h for help' and '"foo" File is read only'. So I use the editor that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time. Ed, man!
/bin/ed /usr/ucb/vi /usr/bin/emacs
!man ed
ED(1) UNIX Programmer's Manual ED(1)
NAME
ed - text editor
SYNOPSIS
ed { - } { -x } { name }
DESCRIPTION
Ed is the standard text editor.
Computer Scientists love ed, not just because it comes first alphabetically, but because it's the standard. Everyone else loves ed because it's ED!
"Ed is the standard text editor."
And ed doesn't waste space on my Timex Sinclair. Just look:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 24 Oct 29 1929
-rwxr-xr-t 4 root 1310720 Jan 1 1970
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990
Of course, on the system I administrate, vi is symlinked to ed. Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which:
1. Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG;
2. reduces the user's disk quota by 100K; and
3. RUNS ED!!!!!!
"Ed is the standard text editor."
Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:
golem$ ed
?
help
?
?
?
quit
?
exit
?
bye
?
hello?
?
eat flaming death
?
^C
?
^C
?
^D
?
---
Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity.
"Ed is the standard text editor."
Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all.
ED IS THE TRUE PATH TO NIRVANA! ED HAS BEEN THE CHOICE OF EDUCATED AND IGNORANT ALIKE FOR CENTURIES! ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR! ED MAKES THE SUN SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!!
When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!
TEXT EDITOR.
When IBM, in its ever-present omnipotence, needed to base their "edlin" on a UNIX standard, did they mimic vi? No. Emacs? Surely you jest. They chose the most karmic editor of all. The standard.
Ed is for those who can *remember* what they are working on. If you are an idiot, you should use Emacs. If you are an Emacs, you should not be vi. If you use ED, you are on THE PATH TO REDEMPTION. THE SO-CALLED "VISUAL" EDITORS HAVE BEEN PLACED HERE BY ED TO TEMPT THE FAITHLESS. DO NOT GIVE IN!!! THE MIGHTY ED HAS SPOKEN!!!
?
No more makin fun o' Dim. It's part of the new way.
Okay, with a name like that I definitely clicked on the link... and I feel *so* cheated.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Uh, never mind...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
So I suppose it will replace every UNIX system by 2038?
Is where IBM raises the dead in an attempt to takeover Earth without ever having to leave the mother ship.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
I was talking about Linux or BSD. Not Windows.
just like BSD.
Plan 9 was designed at Bell Labs as the successor to Unix. Its primary characteristic is that EVERYTHING is managed as a file, down to devices. So if you have a CD in your drive, and you only wanted the data track of the CD mounted, you'd delete the subdirectory containing the audio track and it'd be unmounted. It never really caught on outside of research environments.
What you say is not true.
/proc filesystem and the like. In practice, I think having resources controllable as files is useful only to the entent that nearly every programing language has fwrite() and fread() capability in some way, even if just by shell redirection. There is actually no point in being able to open up a file editor, save to /dev/wifi and have those bits go out over the antennea.
I worked for a time with some people who were deep 9 fans. They wanted to build a network of wireless access points running Plan9, and a big "computing cloud" or "resource cloud". They thought you could make a system where you logged in at any place, and all your windows popped up there with your desktop as you left it halfway accross town; your processes would supposedly migrate from CPU to CPU according to how best to allocate resources; all the files would be spread accross everyone's disks so no one disaster could loose anything, but they would migrate close to you for speed as you used them; etc etc. Basically every cool sounding impractical idea you ever heard of from Freenet to sci-fi cypercrap they said you could do with Plan9.
I got on the 9fans list and read a lot of the web site and then got to work. I found out that they had this concept of a cpuserver versus a disk server versus authentication server, so I had to buy two machines; running everything on one machine was possible but somehow more complecated (I think that is what most people do now, and what the Xen image does, though). So I bought 2 machines and built a third from cast off parts and started installing. I took careful notes of everything, when stuff didn't work I would wipe the disk and start over taking notes again.
I figured out the following things:
1) There is no migration of processes from one CPU server to another. When confronted, the hypesters said "well I never said we wouldn't have to write code"
2) The disk server isn't anything more than any networked filesystem with authentication. They kept making a big deal about the great ideas in their filesystem, and talking a lot about some crap that they had written back when they had a big jukebox of CDRs that made them act like a big mutable filesystem and tracked changes. In the end, it is all just files and directories and passwords, there is nothing new; no files migrate to the machine with the faster disk if they are used often or anything like that. In fact it has bugs and "documentation bugs", but they have so few people using it and helping each other on 9fans that often bugs never get established as being real bugs with the people who should fix them.
3) The user interface is horrible. I think it was written by some guys at Bell Labs who never had a graphical computer in their lives, saw windows 3.1 taking over the world, so read some theoretical papers from SIGRAPH or something and cobbled something together. I have a strong suspicion that Rob Pike and those other fellows can't touch type, and operate a computer by hunting and pecking with the left hand while the right hand operates the mouse. That ACME editor and the interface start to make sense if you immagine a Rip Van Winkle stuck in Bell Labs since 1960 peering out at the world briefly about 1984, and then scuttling back inside and madly hacking some crap for a decade, and then producing it in 1994. If you read the mailing list, it becomes plain that most of these guys use Windows and connect to their Plan9 fetish boxes using a remote desktop tool. This is the only way they can browse the web. All except for a few don't even read their email on Plan9, which supposedly has a great tool for that, they use outlook -- just check the headers on the mailing list.
4) that scripting language rio is just another sh
5) they make a big deal about an "everything is a file" paradigm, parts of which were copied into unix as the
and lot more of the same.
As I worked through these problems and posted on 9fans, I slowly started
If I had been talking about Windows, I would have said a 22-year old operating system.
There were about 30 people attending the International Plan9 Symposium in Madrid last year (of which I was one). So how does that compare with *BSD?
Oh my god! They killed Bell Labs!
-- David
Well, either way, you're wrong. Linux isn't x86 based, it's 386+ based. It doesn't work on 286s (or 086s if you remember those). Plus it's obviously been ported to (and is used and developed on) several other architectures.
Yes, and this is the only interesting story out of the 10% that haven't been on digg first.
I doubt Plan9 is digg material. (I take that back - 2 diggs..)
They'd like Glenda well enough, but who doesn't?
RIO isn't a GUI. It's a window manager. Have a poke around rio.c sometime and the first thing you'll notice is how small and easy to follow it is. Why, I myself have already made great strides in turning rio into something 'nicer'. I am by no means a hardcore coder but I found it easy enough to modify rio to have borderless windows and customizable colors and elements paving the way for running a different GUI -ontop- of RIO. Did someone say fluxbox? Watch this space, it will happen sooner rather than later...
But again, as already mentioned, anyone who complains about the GUI on a COMPUTE SERVER designed to run processes and hand back results has totally missed the point, like that analogy mentioned earlier with the formula one car and the stereo.
Well it does work on 486s.
And while it's been ported, every port is going to bring a certain level of unnecessary bloat and inappropriate design decisions. When you're spending millions and millions of dollars on a supercomputer, why skimp on the operating system?
It's one of the best distributed research OSs there is. We'll have to see, now, if it is as useful a research tool as hoped with so many processors.
It's good to see that you guys "who hardly ever come here any more" happened to be here on the same day as this announcement.
like Ab Initio's Co>Operating System. It uses distributed file systems as well for distributed Extraction Transaction & Loading of data warehouse type applications. But it's as expensive as hell, like $5-10k per processor licensing fee. Be interesting if something like that was built on top of this.
http://blog.slaingod.com
so full of Plan 9 fanboys ?! That article just proves Plan 9 still isn't ready for the desktop.
L/unix and family and Windows et all have similar perspective; one computer/cpu per user possibly connecting to a network. SMP is an after thought and hack, the programming has to be rethought.
Plan 9 alters the perspective of the computer and how it interacts over a network. I understand it to work that every Plan9 site acts as though all parts of the network are available to each user. The basic idea is that the more resources on the network the better your computing experience. Also Plan9 takes Unix's 'everything is a file' even more literally. Including the window manager. kinda freaky to use, never got used to it so have given up for now. Maybe version 5 or 6 may be more 36pack joe friendly.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
have you even used Plan9's interface? it has at LEAST 16 colors.
It is getting better at chess, it takes more concentration each time, but still I win.
"And while it's been ported, every port is going to bring a certain level of unnecessary bloat and inappropriate design decisions."
And Plan 9 doesn't suffer from this? It was designed specifically for Blue Gene was it? I don't think so.
No, but it was designed specifically for distributed computing.
Gnu's Not Unix Plan9 Or Open Source now featuring the herd of cats kernel.
Laugh damn it, it's a joke.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?