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Plan 9 Running on Blue Gene

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the buttonfly-or-zipper dept.

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."

2 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Check out those cutting edge GUI graphics... by Viol8 · · Score: 0, Troll

    "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.

  2. Re:Pretty cool by timeOday · · Score: 0, Troll

    Sounds a lot like X - i.e. designed completely around network transparency, which, as it turns out, isn't all that important after all.