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."

Pretty cool

[Anonymous Coward]

That's pretty cool to think about since I didn't know if Plan 9 is still used or not beyond research environments. Or even developed for. Also I was beginning to think Slashdot was dying since I hardly come here anymore, but with news like this I feel mistaken.. Pretty cool!

Re:Pretty cool

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:About the plan

[morgan_greywolf]

They were called 'Unix'. ;)

Seriously, Plan 9 is/was the planned successor to Unix. You can see the benefits of Plan 9's design today: just check out Inferno [vitanuova.com]. You want distributed computing? It's all in there!

Re:Pretty cool

[aproposofwhat]

IIRC, Lucent Managed Firewalls used to run on Inferno (which is a version of Plan 9)

Don't know if they still do, but the OS is wickedly slim, and ideally suited for network appliances as well as distributed computing.

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

[LWATCDR]

"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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess what Blue Genie is?

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.)

Re:"non-viral" license

[Goaway]

Do people really need to say "non-viral"?

Yes. It is a genuine concern for many people.

Re:"non-viral" license

[nurb432]

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?

Re:Plan 9

[DrSkwid]

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.

Re:About the plan

[Orange Crush]

I can envision Google looking into this as an option for a Google OS. Browser plugin that enables a quasi-VM on the system for cross-platform applications.

I'm not familiar with Inferno, so I have to ask: Why? There are already tons of VMs, quasi VMs and multi-platform toolkits readily available. What benefits would developing with Inferno have over using Java, .net/mono, Flash, XUL, Qt, GTK+, etc?

Plan 9 - the geodesic dome of comp. sci.

[Anonymous Coward]

What you say is not true.

I worked for a time with some people who were deep 9 fans. They wanted to build a network of wireless access points running Plan9, and a big "computing cloud" or "resource cloud". They thought you could make a system where you logged in at any place, and all your windows popped up there with your desktop as you left it halfway accross town; your processes would supposedly migrate from CPU to CPU according to how best to allocate resources; all the files would be spread accross everyone's disks so no one disaster could loose anything, but they would migrate close to you for speed as you used them; etc etc. Basically every cool sounding impractical idea you ever heard of from Freenet to sci-fi cypercrap they said you could do with Plan9.

I got on the 9fans list and read a lot of the web site and then got to work. I found out that they had this concept of a cpuserver versus a disk server versus authentication server, so I had to buy two machines; running everything on one machine was possible but somehow more complecated (I think that is what most people do now, and what the Xen image does, though). So I bought 2 machines and built a third from cast off parts and started installing. I took careful notes of everything, when stuff didn't work I would wipe the disk and start over taking notes again.

I figured out the following things:

1) There is no migration of processes from one CPU server to another. When confronted, the hypesters said "well I never said we wouldn't have to write code"

2) The disk server isn't anything more than any networked filesystem with authentication. They kept making a big deal about the great ideas in their filesystem, and talking a lot about some crap that they had written back when they had a big jukebox of CDRs that made them act like a big mutable filesystem and tracked changes. In the end, it is all just files and directories and passwords, there is nothing new; no files migrate to the machine with the faster disk if they are used often or anything like that. In fact it has bugs and "documentation bugs", but they have so few people using it and helping each other on 9fans that often bugs never get established as being real bugs with the people who should fix them.

3) The user interface is horrible. I think it was written by some guys at Bell Labs who never had a graphical computer in their lives, saw windows 3.1 taking over the world, so read some theoretical papers from SIGRAPH or something and cobbled something together. I have a strong suspicion that Rob Pike and those other fellows can't touch type, and operate a computer by hunting and pecking with the left hand while the right hand operates the mouse. That ACME editor and the interface start to make sense if you immagine a Rip Van Winkle stuck in Bell Labs since 1960 peering out at the world briefly about 1984, and then scuttling back inside and madly hacking some crap for a decade, and then producing it in 1994. If you read the mailing list, it becomes plain that most of these guys use Windows and connect to their Plan9 fetish boxes using a remote desktop tool. This is the only way they can browse the web. All except for a few don't even read their email on Plan9, which supposedly has a great tool for that, they use outlook -- just check the headers on the mailing list.

4) that scripting language rio is just another sh

5) they make a big deal about an "everything is a file" paradigm, parts of which were copied into unix as the /proc filesystem and the like. In practice, I think having resources controllable as files is useful only to the entent that nearly every programing language has fwrite() and fread() capability in some way, even if just by shell redirection. There is actually no point in being able to open up a file editor, save to /dev/wifi and have those bits go out over the antennea.

and lot more of the same.

As I worked through these problems and posted on 9fans, I slowly started

Sounds similar to some ETL tools out there

[slaingod]

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.