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Comment by gregpilling | Hacker News Reader

I like your username. To those that have not read Heinlein's 1959 novel "Moon is a Harsh Mistress"(1), one of main characters is a computer ("High-Optional, Logical, Multi-Evaluating Supervisor, Mark IV, Model L" - a HOLMES FOUR) that the narrating character has named Mycroft Holmes, or Mike for short. Mike is a supercomputer that has other computers added to it, until one day he woke up. It is my favorite novel.

Plan 9 software appears to be software that would enable a person to make a HOLMES FOUR on their own. Pretty cool.

1. http://www.amazon.com/The-Moon-Is-Harsh-Mistress/dp/03128635...

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Yes you exactly have it. And the structure of the ANTS software is intended to bring the "non-disruptible mesh" concept of the revolutionary organization of the novel into the organization of plan 9 grids, which usually have a much less fail-proof chain of linear single-point of failure dependencies.

Manuel said it was poorly engineered and used #3 arm to improve the boot namespace.

My wife works on statistical problems with large data sets. You can imagine her dislike of me the day I accidentally tripped a breaker and shut off her PC which had been running a large model for a couple of days. Would it be possible to use this software and cluster a bunch of old PCs I have from work into my own little Google-esque cloud? Perhaps that could keep me out of the doghouse next time if her models could converge quicker with more computing power.

It depends a lot on definitions. Protecting and backing up your data against hardware failure is a big part of what I want this software to do, but it is not a drop in replacement for mathematical/scientific cluster computing solutions at all. It is more about backing up static data, providing multiple working environments at once, and allowing data to flow between machines in arbitrarily complex ways.

I think this software is very interesting and does have real world uses, but it would need work to turn it into a math/science tool, and in general Plan 9 has a much smaller ecosystem built around these things. There are Plan 9 supercomputing projects like XCPU and if that is compatible with your wife's work it might be relevant to use XCPU top layer on top of ANTS architecture, - but I've never used XCPU personally.

I would say my software at the moment is better suited to hobby and exploration at the moment, but if you were interested in the possibilities, it could have an application in this field.

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