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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."
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.
Obviously it can - it is a supercomputer! (as long as you turn the Aero interface off of course).
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
So that the Soviets can't do it first, obviously.
Vista? Buddy, they have enough on their plate getting a Beowulf cluster of these strung together ...
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