Plan 9 at the Advanced Computing Laboratory

This is the original "Plan 9 at the Advanced Computing Lab" site at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Due to the inability of people there to keep the site running, we present a mirror in hopes that you will find the information, tips and files here useful. The site will not be updated anymore, it is here only as a reference (and a historical document).

The Centre is dead.

Plan 9

Plan 9 is a distributed operating system from Bell-Labs. It is developed by the Computing Sciences Research center, by the same group that developed Unix and C.

The key ideas of Plan 9 are: 1) All resources are presented as files, 2) files are manipulated using a standard protocol (9p) independent of whether they are local or remote, 3) each process has a local namespace which provides a customized view of local and remote resources as files.

Unlike UNIX, where networking was added as an afterthought, Plan 9 was designed as a distributed system. Any remote resource can be made available to the network via the 9p protocol. These features make Plan 9 ideal for a distributed scientific computing environment.

Plan 9 at the Advanced Computing Laboratory

Members of the ACL Advanced Systems, and Cluster Research teams are involved in various areas of research and development using the Plan 9 operating system. Some of our current projects are listed below. A number of us use plan 9 as our daily work environment.

Our current research plan 9 network consists of a fileserver Vampira, a cpu/auth server gateway Plan9, a number of terminals and secondary cpu servers including 12 machines in a powerwall configuration. We also have a small plan 9 network consisting a fileserver, cpu/auth server and a single terminal used for testing purposes.