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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."
Can it run Vista?
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
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?
Yes.
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.
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."
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.
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
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.
Feel like running it, you are welcome to the world of wmii, acme and acid. In short Firefox or for that matter any other application comes lower in hierarchy, a lot of things need to be done to make it first Posix complaint, which i guess they are not planing to so soon.
As far as the people who think it is only for research yes it is and this is what Plan9 on Blue Gene is aimed at. As a research project.
My 2 cents :-)
-- "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" - TAE --
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
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.
"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 full name of the OS is in fact "Plan 9 From Bell Labs". There's also a port of the API to a more popular standard called "Plan 9 From User Space", which is cute.
We at slashdot are scientists, specialists and kernel hackers. Your FUD will be found out.
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.)
The Blue Gene is a supercomputer designed by IBM, based on their research towards the chess computer Deep Blue that beated Kasparov at his own game. It is not a beowulff cluster (that would by definition consist of consumer hardware). I don't have time to look it all up again, but a few years ago I was involved in negotiations for the purchase of such a system...
So, from memory:
Each processor (powerpc/cell technology, I think also used in the PS3, but maybe another expert can enlighten me on that one) is a dual core and has six (or was it four?) high speed network connections to its neighbors. 64 processors are mounted on a "motherboard".
In a rack 16 of these boards are installed. The network connections of the processors on the side of the boards are connected to the neighbors on the boards above and below.
Per rack this amounts to 2048 cores. Each rack is connected back to back to another rack, giving a total of 4096 cores in a kind of network matrix.
These dual racks can again be cascaded to make a very large system. (The slant of the racks, see picture, has to do with the cooling of the system). One of the first computers to use such a matrix setup was the transputer in the 80s.
As said, the processors have high speed connections to their direct neighbors, connections to others are slower.
So this machine is very fast at for example signal processing or, more general, any pipeline where the output of one processor can be sent to the next in line for further processing.
Other applications are for example spatial simulations, climate and such, where each processor gets a part of the atmosphere, assuming that effects to other parts will be more local.
A third is biochemical simulations, hence the "Gene" in its name. And when you turn its coolers temporarily of, you might be able to get water hot enough for coffee.
Plan 9 I have no real knowledge on, but it seems to be an operating system that is tailored to enormous amounts of jobs on massive parallel computers.
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.
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.
So that the Soviets can't do it first, obviously.
And you can run it using Xen, so everyone can try it out and see what's it about.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
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.
Do people really need to say "non-viral"?
Yes. It is a genuine concern for many people.
Or so that it can't do it to the Soviets.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
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!!!
?
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.
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
Inferno is based around the DIS virtual machine and much of the system code is written in Limbo which is compiled to DIS bytecode.
d f
Plan9 is C based and can't run DIS natively.
Plan9 and Inferno now use a unified 9P protocol - 9p2000 (they used to use 9p and Styx respectively).
Lucent sold Inferno to Vita Nuova holdings http://www.vitanuova.com/ and they now develop Inferno and exploit it commercially.
Inferno and Plan9 are used in Lucent products. Plan9 with RT extensions is used in Lucent mobile phone masts to manage calls. Sape Mullender presented a paper at the IWP last year about it. http://plan9.escet.urjc.es/iwp9/cready/realtime.p
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
APE -- The ANSI/POSIX Environment
a co.pdf
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/ape.html
Plan9 has the Abaco web browser, it's still in development but you can use Gmail with it apparently.
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/contrib/fgb/ab
So put your 2c back in your pocket.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Because... well.. just follow the logic of the film, mmkay?
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
The Plan 9 license has been a struggle with Lucent lawyers. Plan 9's 3rd edition was the first that was offered as a free download (which is where I found it via /.) At this time it contained a clause saying you had to submit any kernel changes you made back to Lucent. The Plan9 team fought to get rid of that and did a pretty good job of releasing it under what was thought to be an open source license. The OSI and RMS thought different, iirc it was because of the US munitions export license problem. The license was redone and approved by the OSI as the license we see today.
There was a time where there was a tounge in cheek tickbox that said something like : I promise not to use plan9 to make nuclear weapons outside of the US.
Licensing arguments were pretty common on the mailing list as though the devs were not trying to get it sorted or were in control of writing the damn thing. It got distracting enough that licensing discussions got their own mailing list, which then we could all not bother reading.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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.
Each of the 1024 2-way nodes on a single rack (2048 procs) is a powerpc440d (a cut down 440 w/ an extra FPU, the unfortunately named 'double-hummer'. Nodes are loaded onto a node board (16 nodes per board + 1 or 2 IO nodes, 16 node boards per midplane) that slides into the mid-plane (2 midplanes per rack). There are 3 networks, a mesh network (like noted by spatialguy) where you have a connection to each "nearest neighbor" node surrounding you, a 3d torus network (don't ask me, i just know you specify the dimensions 4x4x3 or something, I'm just an admin :) ) A torus can span multiple racks and I believe can even encompass the whole machine. There is also a vanilla gigabit ethernet network for doing things like NFS/GPFS/Lustre mounts (remember, no local disk).
~~~ They call me Little John, but don't let the name fool you...in real life I'm very big.
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.
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
I am not interested in registering on slashdot, however I have no need of annonimity - I am Steve Simon.
I am shocked at your vitriol for somthing you have obviously invested so much of your time in, its a shame you have wasted a year of your life and gained nothing.
1/ Yep, Plan9 has no process migration - its a shame didn't ask, anyone on 9fans would have told you this.
2/ There are various disk based file servers (as there are for other OSs) and some of these feature immutable backups you mention (which I use). Plan9 doesn't support automatic file migration, except in the form of migration to a disk local to the user (cache filesystem) though I guess this isn't what you expected.
3/ Surely this is just the old "my editor is better than your editor" argument. If you don't like it, don't use it. The application you mention (a cloud of wifi cpu servers) has no need of a plan9 based gui, why not use your favorite editor on your favorite gui to build this product? Personally I like plan9s gui, I find it fast clean and it does everything I need.
4/ The scriping language used is called rc, and _is_ another shell. Rc however is a nicely expressive language with a clean, elegant design. This coupled with the "everything is a file" principal means much can be achieved with it, replacing ruby/python/perl/etc in many applications.
5/ You seem to miss the point i'am afraid, the advantage of having everything as a file, is that once you have a remote file protocol (9p in this case) you can access remote devices and services just as easily as local ones. Think of it as an object oriented system in which the objects are files and the methods are textural messages.
I have no idea why you had so many problems with writing MBRs to disks, I can only say I haven't had similar problems, it is not endemic.
I'am sorry plan9 didn't do what you hoped it might, but that is hardly the fault of the os.
-Steve