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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."
Plan 9 if it had a modern web browser like firefox would generally be as useful as any other now. Basiclly now if you can make an OS that Runs a Modern Web Browser (IE, Mozilla offshoot, Safari, or Opera), and a good office Suite (MS Office, Open Office) then basicly it is as good as any other OS. Comon Google lets get your web Office Suite Really working good so we only need a Web Browser for our OS.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
They were called 'Unix'. ;)
Seriously, Plan 9 is/was the planned successor to Unix. You can see the benefits of Plan 9's design today: just check out Inferno. You want distributed computing? It's all in there!
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Don't know if they still do, but the OS is wickedly slim, and ideally suited for network appliances as well as distributed computing.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
"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.
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.)
Do people really need to say "non-viral"?
Yes. It is a genuine concern for many people.
To some of us yes, its important and does factor into decisions as it can cause long term ramifications.
If licensing restrictions didn't matter to people, we wouldn't even have the concept of BSD license to discuss ( or GPL ), would we?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
There are about 50 active posters to the 9fans mailing list.
There were about 30 people attending the International Plan9 Symposium in Madrid last year (of which I was one).
Plan9 also has 15 projects in the 2007 Google Summer of Code.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I'm not familiar with Inferno, so I have to ask: Why? There are already tons of VMs, quasi VMs and multi-platform toolkits readily available. What benefits would developing with Inferno have over using Java, .net/mono, Flash, XUL, Qt, GTK+, etc?
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