Is there any (public) information about how plan 9 is/was being used on
Blue Gene? The only information I can find seems to be "press
release"-type papers that just say that it runs on Blue Gene, but not
what it was used for nor how it was setup and used.

Steven Vormwald

On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 1:37 PM, Steven Vormwald mtu.edu> wrote:

The existing BG/L port was a prototype proof of concept. It was not
done in a clean-room fashion and so large portions of it are not
releasable. The proof of concept was done as part of a proposal to a
DOE funded project which just got under way. As part of that project
which is funded for the next three years, we'll be doing a "clean"
port to the BG/P (which will be open sourced) along with using Plan 9
to explore large scale (tens of thousands of nodes) distributed
systems. High level details are available off of the IBM Research
pages: http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/hare.index.html

On Sat, 2008-07-26 at 13:47 -0500, Eric Van Hensbergen wrote:

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 7:32 AM, Roman V. Shaposhnik sun.com> wrote:

There is effort ongoing to support certain legacy applications

In the HPC world, there is lots of conservatism. There is an editor at
LANL, named Fred, written in Fortran, that has been in use for longer
than most of you have been alive. Until very recently, it was a
required part of any HPC system.

So, we're doing a binary compatibility module so we can run code
compiled with the hot IBM compilers like XLC and XLF.

ron

ron minnich wrote:

So would developers on this platform be encouraged to use languages and
features currently in plan 9 for HPC development, or would they target
existing HPC languages and features, which would be added to plan 9,
either via native ports or some kind of compatibility layer? I noticed
that a limited version of MPI was mentioned in one of the papers on
IBM's website, but what about other systems, such as Co-Array fortran or
UPC?

Steven Vormwald

Hello,

Just a dumb question, as i'm totally out of this business, it is easier to write an emulator than translate the applications to plan9 c ? (for example) or to write (or port) the C++ and Fortran compilers and related tools?

i'm asking from a technical point of view, i suppose dealing with the current users and customers is the real issue, right?

thanks

gabi

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 10:25 AM, wrote:

and tens of millions of lines of fortran that no one understands anymore....

Its not that we aren't promoting other paradigms, its just we also
need to be able to support existing code bases.

-eric

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 10:21 AM, Steven D. Vormwald mtu.edu> wrote:

It is unlikely that existing features in Plan 9 scale applications (or
system services) to 256,000 cores. The project isn't just to use Plan
9, but to explore distributed system concepts which can be used to
reach such scale. This will involve new system abstractions, new
programing abstractions, new run times, and potentially new
languages.... What ends up other the other end of the pipe may end up
looking very different from Plan 9.

-eric

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 8:25 AM, wrote:

yes. I looked at the app mess for a while.

1. rewrite apps in plan 9 c. The Plan 9 C compiler is fine for what we
do on Plan 9. For scientific apps, it's not that great a compiler. The
IBM compilers know all the tricks. The effort to get Plan 9 C up to
the standards of XLC is mind-boggling. And XLF? We're not going to
write a Fortran compiler from scratch.
2. Port the compilers. Why, exactly? None of the users would be
willing to use a Plan 9 desktop.

partly.