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consider this the proving grounds for such tools on Linux.

Glenda, the bunny, is the Plan 9 mascot. Like Tux the penguin is for Linux:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenda,_the_Plan_9_Bunny

And Glenda's supercomputing cluster at IBM:

http://tinyurl.com/2bz6mf

Edited 2008-11-26 23:10 UTC

That looks photoshopped. I can tell from the pixels, having seen quite a few in my time.

Possibly. But the port is real. More information on the port to BlueGene/L hardware is here:

http://tinyurl.com/5d83r3

Edited 2008-11-27 03:04 UTC

Ummm... No, not photoshopped. Plan 9 on BlueGene was reported on Slashdot a while ago:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/19/1215253

Plan 9 isn't some fly-by-night OS. It was written at Bell Labs as the experimental successor to UNIX. A number of features incorporated into UNIX have come from it /proc, devfs, and the Unicode to name a few.

Obligatory wikipedia mention:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs

The authors are the same guys who originally took part in writing UNIX. It goes without saying that they know what they're doing.

It doesn't have to be Linux to run on a supercomputing cluster.

GC

It isn't? Certainly does look shopped.


And as we know everything posted Slashdot is truth!




Yeah... I have tried Plan 9 a few years ago. They know what they are doing in system design/research, but their aim was not producing a realworld OS. Plan 9 crashes all the time (it's also slow/not optimized and has nonexistent hardware support, but these don't matter on a cluster).

As far as I know there is a Plan 9 cluster run by Ron Minnich and Andrej Mirtchowski at a national laboratory (and it has no bunnies stitched to the racks...), but none at IBM.

GG

What exactly were you running it on? I've never had a problem with Plan 9 crashing at all.

Besides... just because it crashes on your x86 doesn't mean it won't run smoothly elsewhere.

And, no, I didn't say everything that is posted on slashdot is the truth, but the story does seem credible. If you search "Plan 9"+BlueGene on google you'll see that there has been work at IBM on this.

So... you're basing your disbelief on some pixels you think you see? Could you be specific beyond a "feeling" on what is leading you to believe that it is photoshopped? Or is it simply that you don't believe that anything but Linux could do this?

GC

Architecturally, Plan 9 is ideal for this use. Built from the ground up as a distributed system, the concept of "processor server" is basic to it (as are display servers, storage servers, print servers, camera servers, etc.), all communicating happily via 9P. As to how well optimized it, and its compiler is for this use, I don't know. According to the Glendix paper, KenCC, written in only 1/17th as many lines of code as gcc, can do everything that gcc can. One could be forgiven for having a few doubts about that, though.

Edited 2008-11-27 15:03 UTC

Have you ever seen GCC's source code? I can tell you from experience that I have no problems believing that a smaller, better written compiler is possible. There's a decent amount of bloat there.

Yeah, I've seen quite a few pixels in my time too. Oh hot damn, there's another one.

</smartass>

"That reminds me of someone. You know who I mean... that person, the one who's always standing and walking."

If you look really carefully, under a magnifying glass, you can see that each pixel has an Adobe logo in the bottom right corner.

BTW, I did some research, and the photo was, indeed, photoshopped by "Andrey":

http://graverobbers.blogspot.com/2007/04/more-plan-9-on-blue-gene.h...

Not as a hoax, but as an upfront little joke.

Plan 9 on BG/L is real. And I would be very interested in information regarding how useful it is in that capacity.

Edited 2008-11-27 19:14 UTC

Yes, and even just at a casual glance, the logos appear way too uniform to be anything other than a copy-paste job.

It was the wording of the original "This looks photoshopped because of the pixels" post that I found amusing, not the notion itself.

Why you know this is beyond me.

I would retract that rather overzealous statement if I could! However, the fact remains that GCC *is* rather bloated, even if the Plan 9 C compilers don't offer all the features GCC does.

A drop in the bucket compared to the overzealous statements I've heard from GNU software fans. ;-)

Anyway, since I have a Plan9 knowledgeable person handy, and haven't been able to find it anywhere else, may I ask what are the current limitations of Fossil? Max file size? Max volume size? 9P gets all the press, but it's really just a wire protocol, like NFS, and not really a filesystem. (Not to belittle 9P. In an OS where *everything* is truly a file, the filesystem wire protocol takes on a whole new significance.)

Also, any comments on where Plan9 or Plan9 ideas have proved useful in the real world. UTF-8... (and powering the bell-labs.com site), of course. Other stuff?

Edited 2008-11-27 19:29 UTC

To be honest I have not found much information about the max file size or the max volume size of Fossil/Venti (Venti is the actual storage server). I did however find a paper referencing Fossil/Venti's abilitiy to hold at least an exabyte of data. I would assume Plan9 has a large storage capacity but the information is slim.

he wasn't talking about that, he was talking about the eight billion Ubuntu "derivative" distributions.

Not to mention Debian derivatives?

I never hear Debian mentioned anymore.

Debian is implicit in any mention of the Ubuntu family. In my opinion, Debian's strength and destiny lies with providing a solid foundation for derivative distros. I view Debian Stable as a sort of reference implementation to keep them on track.

Implicit to your or me, but Ubuntu is pulling in all kinds of people who don't know anything about Linux, or the history of Ubuntu.

I ran Slack and Debian before Ubuntu was born... both were, and still ARE excellent distributions... but I understand that the success of marketing Ubuntu is also (in a way) success for linux in general.

I know Debian still lives and breaths, I just feel like it is never mentioned anymore... and that makes me sad because it is an excellent package.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.ubuntu.com+debi...

Edited 2008-11-28 19:12 UTC

O.K. You win. Debian is everywhere and is mentioned frequently. There are a lot of Debian articles on OSNews and slashdot and everywhere else too. In fact, now that you mention it, I just turned around and saw the debian symbol in the stucco on my wall.