Publicado en Computación Científica Libre.

Plan 9 es un sistema operativo experimental de los laboratorios Bell (http://cm.bell-labs.com/plan9/). Está diseñado para asistir en el desarrollo de aplicaciones en ambientes distribuidos. Una reseña del sistema aparece en OSNews.

Descripción

Plan 9 offers only a few advantages to single workstation users running
in isolation. Its advantages grow rapidly as the number of networked
Plan 9 workstations increase. If you are developing a large distributed
computing application, using Plan 9 makes a lot of sense. If, for
instance, you are performing large-scale scientific computing that
needs to run across a large number of computers you are faced with a
variety of difficult challenges. A particular problem in large node
computing is that the failure of a single node can bring your whole
computing cluster to a halt. This problem is increasingly likely as the
number of processors increase. Consider that a computer node with a
mean time between failure of 10,000 hours (or about 1.15 years), when
used in a cluster of 10,000 nodes will fail on average of once an hour.
In other words, your large, expensive super-computer will crash once an
hour. Plan 9 provides the basis for writing processes that can be
mirrored or replicated in more efficient ways and can become fault
tolerant. Without increased fault tolerance, large scale computing just
doesn’t scale well.

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