when the plan 9 on blue gene started, and for some time later, there was a specialised kernel (the "compute kernel"?) for BG, which was a bit like DOS, so we felt we had a contribution to make, with an OS designed for an age of distribution. later it turned out that SC/HPC like everything else just imports a ton of 3rd party code and languages (eg, Python) and just accepts burning power and money to do that. linux might insist on screwing up your latency by running the lpd on a BG HPC system but at least it supported systemd.
fscfs began as a quick hack in response to Ron's observing that a presentation at a conference said some python code starting up on a large BG cluster took many hours, much of it spent on every compute server asking IO servers whether every combination of .py, .pyc, existed for every version for every naming convention, on *every* processor, something like that. whack a file server. in our system, we could have fscfs running on appropriate nodes on the way to the file server to remember bad ideas and also cache stuff shared by the cpu servers. On Sat, 28 Dec 2024 at 00:08, Ron Minnich <rminn...@p9f.org> wrote: > On Fri, Dec 27, 2024 at 1:12 PM Kurt H Maier via 9fans <9fans@9fans.net> > wrote: > > > Which architecture and OS did they wind up with? I was part of the team > > that went on to administer the Coral systems, which were linux on POWER > > 9+. Even the early-stage bringup loaders were linux systems. I > > remember they had to ship a couple x86 systems anyway, because Mellanox > > wouldn't make a POWER build of UFM. > > Everything in HPC is a linux now, at least all the top 500 systems ... > as for architecture, it's interesting to see the Top 1 machine > moving from Power to whatever tianhe was to ARM to x86 again ... and > my vague memory is that the early riken were sparc before riken moved > to ARM? > Somebody want to confirm or deny this? > > Once HPC was able to fix on Linux, it unlocked the door to using > different architectures.. That was kind of nice. I was sorry to see > that Plan 9 did not work out, but at least Linux did work out, > especially considering the two-year period in the late 90s where DoD > wanted us all to run Windows/NT. Not kidding. > > > I always thought NIX would have been a good fit for Xeon Phi MICs, since > > part of the bringup involved shipping an entire linux system to the card > > for booting anyway. > > I agree with you. Some part of the NIX ideas were inspired, if that's > the word, from the Intel ideas of the 2008 or so period. > > By the way, thanks also to Gorka, for arranging my time at lsub in > 2011; and Enrique, for a lot of nice work getting NIX going. > > It was a great month with great people. > > I did just notice this, > https://code.google.com/archive/p/nix-os/wikis/GettingStarted.wiki, > which would let you build nix and try it out. ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T7692a612f26c8ec5-M97bdbbcfae739f7168dc943a Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
