Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Pi-Powered Plan 9 Cluster

rs-online.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 56 posts

Re: A Pi-Powered Plan 9 Cluster

#41

Post by MisterTea »

arghwhat wrote: post #37
MisterTea wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the latency which is the achilles heel of 9p and plan 9 in general. With 9p, for every T message there's an R message that is waited on before the next T is sent. So if there's 100ms of latency you have to wait 100ms between EVERY 9p message. Pain and suffering. The labs people never focused on performance but actually building a clean comprehensive system with the small team they had. It was a pragmatic a…

> With 9p, for every T message there's an R message that is waited on before the next T is sent. This is entirely false. The 9P protocol is asynchronous, can handle up to 16k outstanding requests, supports out-of-order responses, and includes support for arbitrary request cancellation, The only thing thing that blocks to wait for an R message are blocking syscalls , but that doesn't stop other processes from sending…

Yes this is true, I was over simplifying it.

But this is the reason why drawterm or rcpu is not very usable over high latency connections.

Re: A Pi-Powered Plan 9 Cluster

#42

Post by moth-fuzz »

I discovered this article a while ago when I was toying around with using plan 9 as it was designed, as a fully transparent distributed operating system. After reading this article I was a little shocked because the author didn't do any configuration or setup for the other machines, so I thought, wow! Plan 9 was so advanced that all you need are multiple machines present on the same network and it will automatically 'clusterize' them.

So I went out to make my own cluster and realized that no, sadly, the author simply did not activate nor configure the other machines at all.

I still love plan 9 and still use it on the occasion, but I'd love more detail on how to actually set up a plan9 cluster and really 'get into' the power of distributed computing.

Re: A Pi-Powered Plan 9 Cluster

#43

Post by asim »

We tried hosting Micro (micro.mu) on Pi last year as a test to create some sort of global distributed network for services. Micro is written in Go and as Plan 9 focuses everything as a file, micro focuses on everything as a service. This post is really fascinating. In some ways the popularity of it makes me think self hosted Pi for cloud services might be viable. Even to the point of designing a packaged solution for devs.

For reference https://micro.mu/blog/2019/12/05/building-a-microservices-ne...

Re: A Pi-Powered Plan 9 Cluster

#44

Post by bullen »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #38
bullen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are much faster because they draw more energy. The Raspberry 4 at 1 Gflops/watt is a better option if you want to power the thing with lead acid batteries as backup power for more than 24 hours. Also Raspberry 4 can be cooled passively with a smaller heatsink so the total size and weight is less.

PI's are not really power efficient - their CPU is made on super-obsolete 40nm node. They have no sleep mode, or any low-power mode for that matter. Imagine how long a phone would last on that battery - its the same class of CPU. An Intel compute stick or beelink mini pcs are also passively cooled and weigh no more.

Nope 28nm for the Raspberry 4. And 5nm is not going to save you that much energy compared to 28nm, it will however make the circuit much more fragile.

The Raspberry 4 is peak power efficient: http://web.eece.maine.edu/~vweaver/group/green_machines.html

Mobile phones don't have a keyboard, you can only consume with them. I produce things.

Those sticks don't have a company with it's own GPU and linux (Raspbian now RaspberryOS) behind them and they cost more per watt for performance I don't need.

However I have 2x NUC with Streacoms passive case: https://streacom.com/products/nc2-fanless-chassis/

Re: A Pi-Powered Plan 9 Cluster

#45

Post by kingosticks »

bullen wrote: post #44
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PI's are not really power efficient - their CPU is made on super-obsolete 40nm node. They have no sleep mode, or any low-power mode for that matter. Imagine how long a phone would last on that battery - its the same class of CPU. An Intel compute stick or beelink mini pcs are also passively cooled and weigh no more.

Nope 28nm for the Raspberry 4. And 5nm is not going to save you that much energy compared to 28nm, it will however make the circuit much more fragile. The Raspberry 4 is peak power efficient: http://web.eece.maine.edu/~vweaver/group/green_machines.html Mobile phones don't have a keyboard, you can only consume with them. I produce things. Those sticks don't have a company with it's own GPU and linux (Raspbian now Rasp…

28nm vs 5nm, is what, 3 generations with a 20-30% power saving at each step. ~50% power reduction is something.

Re: A Pi-Powered Plan 9 Cluster

#46

Post by bullen »

kingosticks wrote: post #45
bullen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope 28nm for the Raspberry 4. And 5nm is not going to save you that much energy compared to 28nm, it will however make the circuit much more fragile. The Raspberry 4 is peak power efficient: http://web.eece.maine.edu/~vweaver/group/green_machines.html Mobile phones don't have a keyboard, you can only consume with them. I produce things. Those sticks don't have a company with it's own GPU and linux (Raspbian now Rasp…

28nm vs 5nm, is what, 3 generations with a 20-30% power saving at each step. ~50% power reduction is something.

Nope, if you compare theoretical Gflops/watt it's probably 30%, but in practice you'll only get maybe 15%. Memory speed is the bottleneck and you cannot get around that. DDR3 had lower latency than DDR6 and only bandwidth is increasing, and you have to ask bandwidth for what?

Re: A Pi-Powered Plan 9 Cluster

#47

Post by pjmlp »

arghwhat wrote: post #39
pjmlp wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everything will feel local. Not in what concerns graphics rendering performance.

Have you used a Plan9 UI recently? The simple draw commands issued by Plan9 applications over /dev/draw by e.g. acme or rio shouldn't be cause for concern. There is no accelerated graphics here, nor UIs that need it.

Exactly, because the infrastructure wasn't never there, as Carmack pointed out back in the day.

Re: A Pi-Powered Plan 9 Cluster

#48

Post by kingosticks »

bullen wrote: post #46
kingosticks wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

28nm vs 5nm, is what, 3 generations with a 20-30% power saving at each step. ~50% power reduction is something.

Nope, if you compare theoretical Gflops/watt it's probably 30%, but in practice you'll only get maybe 15%. Memory speed is the bottleneck and you cannot get around that. DDR3 had lower latency than DDR6 and only bandwidth is increasing, and you have to ask bandwidth for what?

Sorry, I don't follow. Why would anything be getting faster if we are talking about hypothetically utilising (just) the power-saving gains from newer nodes?

Re: A Pi-Powered Plan 9 Cluster

#49

Post by arghwhat »

pjmlp wrote: post #47
arghwhat wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you used a Plan9 UI recently? The simple draw commands issued by Plan9 applications over /dev/draw by e.g. acme or rio shouldn't be cause for concern. There is no accelerated graphics here, nor UIs that need it.

Exactly, because the infrastructure wasn't never there, as Carmack pointed out back in the day.

"wasn't never there"?

Acme and Rio are simple because they should be, not because they couldn't be anything else.

Although, you are correct that UIs have degraded extremely in tandem with the increase in available resources, which is very frustrating.

Re: A Pi-Powered Plan 9 Cluster

#50

Post by Naac »

I think I missed something.

Is there any setup required in software for the actual cluster? It looks like there are 4 Pis all running a Pi Plan 9 image, and they're wired together via ethernet. But where is the software setup to link them all together? Or does this just happen automatically on Plan 9?

Post reply on HN