A Pi-powered Plan 9 cluster

Plan 9 from Bell Labs comes from the same stable as the UNIX operating system, which of course Linux was designed after, and Apple's OS X runs on top of a certified UNIX operating system. Just like UNIX, Plan 9 was developed as a research OS - a vehicle for trying out new concepts - with it building on key UNIX principles and taking the idea of devices are just files even further. In this post, we take a quick look at the Plan 9 OS and some of the notable features, before moving on to the construction of a self-contained 4-node Raspberry Pi cluster that will provide a compact platform for experimentation. The post is almost a year old, but it hasn't ever appeared here, and for that I will not stand. Plan 9 gets little attention and press, and that's decidedly a shame.