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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."

8 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Yeah but... by niceone · · Score: 5, Funny

    Obviously it can - it is a supercomputer! (as long as you turn the Aero interface off of course).

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  2. No sale by squiggleslash · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm not buying a Blue Gene until they port AmigaOS to it, like God intended.

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  3. Re:About the plan by MyLongNickName · · Score: 5, Funny

    You laugh about such things. But I was the beta tester for Preparation G. Stuff was awful. But boy could I whistle really well after that.

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  4. Book. Cover. Judge. Don't. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Check out those cutting edge GUI graphics... by LWATCDR · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "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.

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  6. Re:Check out those cutting edge GUI graphics... by mls · · Score: 5, Informative

    "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

    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.
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    -mls
  7. Re:Pretty cool by C0y0t3 · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...Also I was beginning to think Slashdot was dying since I hardly come here anymore...

    ... but I see your comments ALL OVER Slashdot, Anonymous Coward. In fact you're probably THE most prolific user, certainly the most outspoken.
  8. Re:Plan 9 by DrSkwid · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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