From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] Creating a Plan 9 exhibit for an Expo. Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 14:05:09 -0600 From: andrey mirtchovski In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Topicbox-Message-UUID: e4b05a3a-eacd-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > One obvious and classic demo would be some parralel graphics rendering on > Plan 9 machines, more serious ideas anyone? > > Boris > i'd say rendering graphics on separate machines is more of an example of cluster computing than grid computing. what Plan 9 has and other systems lack (exclusing inferno), is an easy way to share resources between computers. examples of that could be as simple as mounting the two ends of a pipe, #|, on two different systems and having programs talk to each other through them. importing network stacks or sources.cs are other good examples -- run 'history' on sources.cs and you have a rough equivalent of cvs. furthermore, you're not limited in what you can share with plan 9. have a supported hardware device (canonical example is an audio player)? well, you could share it everywhere -- just import its driver interface. so i have a tv tuner card at home with the cable plugged in -- i can import it from university and watch tv! (well, my network isn't fast enough for that, but grids have never been about speed :) or look at nemo's work using redirfs and x10 -- the music follows you when you move around the rooms in a building. all you need is to remount the right /dev/audio under your music player's stream. none of this requires any special clients -- it's all 'ls', 'cat', 'grep' and 'sed', mount and exportfs. perhaps a good example you could use is to import /dev/draw from several plan 9 computers and have them render a static image: http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~mirtchov/lanlp9/newnetwork/pw.html andrey ps: the definition of grid computing i use, 'sharing resources across administrative domains', may not be universally adopted. pps: can redirfs be used for channel bonding, i wonder?