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."

Re:Pretty cool

[b1ufox]

Incidentally perhaps you are misunderstanding Plan9. It is not the kind of OS *we* are used to. That said it includes L/unix and family and Windows et all. It serves a different purpose of OS all together, in other terms its a distributed Operating system which incidentally is not designed purposefully to run on your standalone machine.

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 :-)

Re:Check out those cutting edge GUI graphics...

[mls]

"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 [bell-labs.com]

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.

Re:Plan 9?

[Verte]

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.

Re:Implications

[spatialguy]

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.

Re:Check out those cutting edge GUI graphics...

[Dopeskills]

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 - a radical OS

[andrewzx1]

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 [osnews.com]

Re:Pretty cool

[DrSkwid]

Inferno is based around the DIS virtual machine and much of the system code is written in Limbo which is compiled to DIS bytecode.

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/ [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.pd f [escet.urjc.es]

Re:Pretty cool

[DrSkwid]

APE -- The ANSI/POSIX Environment
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/ape.html [bell-labs.com]

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/aba co.pdf [bell-labs.com]

So put your 2c back in your pocket.

Re:"non-viral" license

[DrSkwid]

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.

Plan 9, the short short version

[qweqwe321]

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.

Re:Implications

[xcjohn]

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).

Plan 9 is an excellent system for Blue Gene

[randolph]

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.

Re:Plan 9 - the geodesic dome of comp. sci.

[Anonymous Coward]

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