On Fri, Jan 03, 2025 at 12:32:55PM -0800, Skip Tavakkolian wrote:
> Just saw a review of System76 Thelio Astra (Ampere Altra). An arm64 system
> with 128 cores and 512GB of memory for under $7500. NIX's model seems more
> and more applicable to commodity hardware.
>
Since there is a plan9 foundation now, and there will be soon (May
22-24, 2025) the 11th International Workshop on Plan9, there are means
to put everything together, theory and practice, for example by
choosing and buying hardware fit for testing ideas---I would be
personnally OK to contribute for some hundreds of $ to the foundation
for this.
And the goal is, as usual, to find a thundering advertisement. For
example:
Demonstrate that if the right OS principles were used, and the
right software, the savings in electricity for computation of
weather evolution and generation of academic papers would be so
huge, that the Earth will indeed be facing a glaciation age and not
a global warming, so that Miami would be one of the hugest ski
resort in the world, exploiting ski slopes on icebergs floating near
its costs---put in other words: that this is the modelisations and the
diarrhea of academic papers (using TeXlive and not kerTeX :-^) on the
present OSes and with the present software that are responsible for the
"global warming".
> On Fri, Jan 3, 2025, 11:11?AM Ron Minnich <rminn...@p9f.org> wrote:
>
> > On Wed, Jan 1, 2025 at 4:35?AM <tlaro...@kergis.com> wrote:
> > > Is the number of TC fixed, or is it at least one TC and the number
> > > can increase if needed (or, put it differently, can a AC, if needed,
> > > switch to a TC and vice-versa)?
> >
> > Fixed, I believe, at boot time? I no longer recall. Nemo and lsub did
> > experiment
> > with dynamic counts, but I came from an HPC/LinuxBios background:
> > nodes boot in seconds,
> > so I did not worry about "fixed at boot time" type issues. Want to
> > change configuration? reboot.
> > Starting a new job? reboot. And so on.
> >
> > > Had you the opportunity to measure how "bad" some application
> > > workloads could be because the number of TC---after the
> > > initialization period---exceeded largely the number of AC with a not zero
> > > pointer?
> > >
> >
> > That would be good to do, now that we have machines with hundreds of cores.
> >
> > > Theoretically, could a machine with different kind of cores, perhaps with
> > > differing architectures (specialized cores) but sharing at least
> > > with a common MMU read/write (data) pages (for the kernel shared
> > > data: locks and so on) be possible, with a system such as NIX in fact
> > > scheduling to the matching kind of AC core for the task to be run?
> >
> > You have that already, nowadays, starting with big/little, and moving
> > to the intel
> > CPUs with widely varying core types. Esperanto has specialized cores too.
> >
> > I think having incompatible architectures is already there, too, with
> > GPUs and smart nics like the AWS and Google ones.
> > Well, hmm, that kind of "sharing with compatible MMU" was started by
> > quadrics in the 90s, so it's not new.
> >
> > This has been a very interesting discussion, thanks all. My offer
> > remains: if anyone wants to revive NIX, I am happy to help.
> >
> > ron
--
Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ kergis +dot+ com>
http://www.kergis.com/
http://kertex.kergis.com/
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