Skip to main content
Log in

Experiences porting the Plan 9 research operating system to the IBM Blue Gene supercomputers

  • Special Issue Paper
  • Published:
Computer Science - Research and Development

Abstract

In this paper we discuss our experiences in bringing Plan 9 to the IBM Blue Gene series supercomputers. We describe our research goals in doing the work; the effort needed for the port; some of the unique aspects of Plan 9 and their application to BG/P networks; an MPI-like library we have developed for native Plan 9 programs on Blue Gene; and, finally, a binary compatibility environment which can run Blue Gene Compute Node Kernel programs. We are currently working on bringing up the Linpack benchmark, with the goal of gaining a place for Plan 9 on the Top 500 list.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Bohrer P, Peterson J, Elnozahy M, Rajamony R, Gheith A, Rockhold R, Lefurgy C, Shafi H, Nakra T, Simpson R, Speight E, Sudeep K, Van Hensbergen E, Zhang L (2004) Mambo: a full system simulator for the powerpc architecture. SIGMETRICS Perform Eval Rev 31(4):8–12

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Gara A, Blumrich MA, Chen D, Chiu GL-T, Coteus P, Giampapa M, Haring RA, Heidelberger P, Hoenicke D, Kopcsay GV, Liebsch TA, Ohmacht M, Steinmacher-Burow BD, Takken T, Vranas P (2005) Overview of the blue gene/l system architecture. IBM J Res Develop 49(2-3):195–212

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Levesque JM (2007) Sustained petaflops the dream is coming true. In: Supercomputing 2007. Cray, Reno, NV

  4. Lieber D, Almsi G, Brunherot J, Inglett T, Shmueli E, Sidelnik A, Castanos J, Dozsa B, Kumar S (2007) The what, why and how of linux on bluegene compute nodes. In: Proceedings of the Los Alamos Computer Science Institute (LACSI) Symposium (CDROM), Santa Fe, NM, October 2007

  5. Minnich RG, Pryor DV (1993) Radiative heat transfer simulation on a sparcstation farm. Concurrency: Practice and Experience 5:345–358

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Pike R, Presotto D, Dorward S, Flandrena B, Thompson K, Trickey H, Winterbottom P (1995) Plan 9 from Bell Labs. Comput Syst 8(3):221–254

    Google Scholar 

  7. Presotto D, Winterbottom P (1993) The organization of networks in Plan 9. In: USENIX Association. Proceedings of the Winter 1993 USENIX Conference, pp 271–280 (of x+530), Berkeley, CA, USA, USENIX

  8. Sottile M, Minnich R (2004) Analysis of microbenchmarks for performance tuning of clusters. In: CLUSTER ’04: Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing, pp 371–377, Washington, DC, USA, IEEE Computer Society

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ronald G. Minnich.

Additional information

Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company, for the United States Department of Energys National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DEAC0494AL85000. SAND-2009-0514C.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Minnich, R.G., Mckie, J. Experiences porting the Plan 9 research operating system to the IBM Blue Gene supercomputers . Comp. Sci. Res. Dev. 23, 117–124 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00450-009-0070-z

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00450-009-0070-z

Keywords

Navigation