From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Sat Nov 21 1998 - 15:41:40 MST
Ken Meyering writes:
> We need to create a new OS. We need to do it as an open source
> internet project. We can base it on Unix, or use some other OS,
> looking to Thinking Machines, Cray, or some other parallel
> distributed system for a model to learn from.
We don't need a yet another OS: there is a number of powerful but
virtually unknown OSses out there: VxWorks, OS 9, Taos, Plan 9,
Mach, Hurd, L4, diverse ForthOS'ses and lots of crazy experimental
whatnots. We rather need a trick how we can make the marketplace
adopt them to max out on diversity. You can't create artificial
demand for a fine-grained efficient OS like L3 or L4 (open source,
12 kByte OOP microkernel written in Intel assembly, Linux
personality) if the people don't care for things like messaging
latency, die yield and doing sensible computing with WSI systems with
<< 1 MBit grains. How do _you_ write an OS to operate on a 300 mm
wafer with ~1000 gates/die grains, mostly locally connected? Ever
programmed an 'OS' for an analog FPGA or a hardware cellular
automaton? Ever thought about how to utilize
packet-switch-networked self-contained VLIW systems with on-die
buses a few kBit wide? Ask your friendly Bunny Man from a local
foundry, or a systems programmer how he feels about that.
A 300 mm wafer has about 70 000 mm^2 usable area. With near-future
0.1 um structures you can get about 100 million transistors (1/4 of
that with current technology) on each 1 mm^2 die (random defect hits
taking out several hundreds or even a few thousand of dies out of
each wafer if you want to go WSI). With about 10^12 transistor
equivalents (that's ~1 TeraTransistor, folks) that 300 mm wafer
is an awesome resource, if used right. I think a hardware CA with
~1 Gcells with a >10 GHz clock sold for 1..2 k$ could be good
for something. But how can a new OS help you here?
> The problem is simple: We're going to need to be able to program this
> massive supercomputer called "The Internet". The broadband
> infrastructure to support distributed nonlinear video requires this.
Whip up a hypercube Beowulf running PVM/MPI (or U-Net on DEC Tulips
with about 30 us messaging latency, 20 MByte via Tx crossover
cabling for full duplex, can bundle ports) or Myrinet. If you
really want to flood your PCI or saturate your system with
interrupts, buy a GBit ethernet card (if you want to do it
cheaper, plug 3 or even 4 FastEthernet cards into your node).
Voila, a commodity off-shelf supercomputer -- Beowulf people
are doing it all the time.
The infrastructure is all there. All you need are applications. What was
your rationale for a yet another OS? Distributed nonlinear video?
Shucks, PVM even runs on Win98/NT. If not for security reasons, you
could install PVM on every networked box on the Internet and break
DES, find your favourite Mersenne, and povray Pixar out of the water.
Little else, for latency and bandwidth won't let you shock the
top500.org crowd, alas. (Maybe a decade downsteam, if you'd find
a way to evolve FPGAs/machine instructions robustly, and precipitate
Singularity you could impress _some_ people ;)
The infrastructure is all there. All you need are applications. What was
your rationale for a yet another OS? Distributed nonlinear video?
ciao,
'gene
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