Plan 9 Running on Blue Gene 190
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Book. Cover. Judge. Don't. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Check out those cutting edge GUI graphics... (Score:5, Insightful)
The WHOLE POINT of Blue Gene is to do intellectual exercises. It's a RESEARCH computer.
Re:Check out those cutting edge GUI graphics... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Check out those cutting edge GUI graphics... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Check out those cutting edge GUI graphics... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.