A team comprised of members from Bell-Labs, IBM Research, Sandia National Labs, and Vita Nuova has completed a port of Plan 9 to the Blue Gene supercomputer. Plan 9 kernels are running on both the compute nodes and the I/O nodes and the Ethernet, Torus, Collective Network, Barrier Network, and Management network are all supported. Screenshots are available on the development blog, and a live-demo will be attempted during the USENIX poster session.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2006-04-21
X-Window? GUI? What flexibility?
You know, the flexibility that allows you to choose WindowMaker or blackbox, GNOME or KDE?
We are talking about an operating system not about a geek-chick magnet! Plan 9 comes with a GUI that has all and more capabilities than X-Window, like network transparency (even if it has no networking code on it) and alpha blending (Porter-Duff algebra... The "Duff" guy worked at bell labs at the time rio, the Plan 9 GUI came to life). I am not saying that it is beautiful, though... But I like it and it gets my work done.
It may have "more capabilities than X Window", but it sorely lacks the one I wrote about in my first post. Yes, there will always be people who really don't give a damn about the state of their windowing system as long as it works, but I suspect those among us who can't work with a system which looks like a camel's rear end are in the majority. And of course although we may all agree that X (the variable, not the window system) looks like a camel's arse, we're very unlikely to all agree on whether A, B, C, Y, or Z doesn't.
Member since:2007-06-18
It is not about a windowing system... Do you really think that Blue Gene is a desktop computer?
It is about having a OS for concurrent computing.
Plan 9 could be very capable of being the perfect desktop OS, IMHO... jejeje... But yes, people like windows, beryl and those things... I agree...
I am just saying that what matters isn't the gui it runs... Is what it does better than the rest of OOSS.
Member since:2005-10-31
Member since:
2007-06-18
X-Window? GUI? What flexibility?
We are talking about an operating system not about a geek-chick magnet! Plan 9 comes with a GUI that has all and more capabilities than X-Window, like network transparency (even if it has no networking code on it) and alpha blending (Porter-Duff algebra... The "Duff" guy worked at bell labs at the time rio, the Plan 9 GUI came to life). I am not saying that it is beautiful, though... But I like it and it gets my work done.
Plan 9 and Inferno capabilities for distributed computing are trully amazing... An this is the stuff that matters..
Please, for all those who love giving opinions... Pleas e read a little and get really informed about what is going on.
Congratulations to the Plan 9 on Blue Gene/L team!!