Plan 9 From Bell Labs: Anybody use this?

V

Videodrome

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I really became interested in the Linux / UNIX world during my college program. If I want this stuff to be a part of my career direction, I wondered if I should look into Plan 9 more. So far, I have installed the basic system and just explored their Rio window manager a little bit. Before I bother tackling this, I wondered if this is even widely used outside of a few University science research teams. I guess it's main advantage is parallel processing or distributed computing.

http://cm.bell-labs.com/plan9/


Plan9bunnysmblack.jpg
 
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I have never even heard of this. And I am working on a parallel processing project at SIUE.
 
Plan 9 is like an unofficial sequel to UNIX. It's not like FreeBSD or Linux though. Some commands are similar, but many are different. It's like they took the core ideas from UNIX they liked and started over.

 
Videodrome said:
Out of curiosity, what are you currently using for parallel processing?
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As of right now a LittleFE with Ubuntu server on the master and Arch on the slaves.
Once we get some nice funding we plan to move to raspberryPis then eventually JetsonTK1s.
 
ryanvade said:
As of right now a LittleFE with Ubuntu server on the master and Arch on the slaves.
Once we get some nice funding we plan to move to raspberryPis then eventually JetsonTK1s.
Click to expand...

Thanks. This is an area of computing I've been kind of curious about.
 
I would say stick to GNU/Linux or BSD... Plan 9 just seems so useless in a modern world. I could be wrong, I don't know much about it. The idea of cluster computing can be done by using DistCC and cross-compiling I believe. As a computer engineering student myself, I also share this interest in UNIX-like OS's. However, Linux keeps me happy :)
 
Kryyll said:
I would say stick to GNU/Linux or BSD... Plan 9 just seems so useless in a modern world. I could be wrong, I don't know much about it. The idea of cluster computing can be done by using DistCC and cross-compiling I believe. As a computer engineering student myself, I also share this interest in UNIX-like OS's. However, Linux keeps me happy :)
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Thats not quite what Parallel Processing is. The idea is to take a process that would require an unrealistic amount of time and make it compute in a realistic amount of time by adding processing units. Usually this is either by adding massive GPUs with their thousands of cores or by slaving computers together. Think of using CUDA with MPICH.
 
ryanvade said:
Thats not quite what Parallel Processing is. The idea is to take a process that would require an unrealistic amount of time and make it compute in a realistic amount of time by adding processing units. Usually this is either by adding massive GPUs with their thousands of cores or by slaving computers together. Think of using CUDA with MPICH.
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Thank you for clearing that up :)
 
One example I heard is a FreeBSD Cluster was used to render the CGI in The Matrix.
 
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