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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."
Ya, if you're creating a desktop OS. Somehow, booting the thing on Blue Gene, I don't think that's Plan 9's plan.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
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.
The WHOLE POINT of Blue Gene is to do intellectual exercises. It's a RESEARCH computer.
Currently hooked on AMP
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.
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.
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.