Re: [9fans] Plan 9 and multicores/parallelism/concurrency?

["Roman V. Shaposhnik" <rvs@sun.com>]

On Mon, 2008-07-14 at 08:45 +0000, ssecorp wrote:
> from wikipedia:
> "Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system, primarily
> used for research."
>
> but it doesnt say anything more about the distributed part.
>
> I have recently found a big interest in concurrency, distributed
> systems and multicore-programming.
>
> So is Plan 9 good for a multicore-computer or what kind of distributed
> system is it made for?

I believe the real question is not whether Plan9 is good for multicore,
but whether multicore is any good as a long term computing strategy.

My personal impression has always been that Plan9 is the best OS for
distributed memory systems. I believe that folks working with IBM can
elaborate on that. As for the shared memory (whether NUMA or not) the
pressure is more on application (and thus application level languages
and tools) than on OS. It'll be interesting to see how a single Plan9
kernel scales on something like a Batoka box (256 hardware threads per
box, 64 physical cores). On the other hand, may be the trick is not
to scale a single kernel on something like that but have multiple
kernels running under something like Xen or kvm.

Thanks,
Roman.