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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."
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!
My blog
"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.
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