Plan 9 - an integrated approach to grid computing

Summary form only given. This paper describes the use of the "Plan 9 from Bell Labs " distributed operating system as a grid computing infrastructure. In particular it compares solutions using the de facto standard middleware toolkit for grids, Globus, to an environment constructed using computers running the Plan 9 operating system. These environments are compared based on the features they offer in the context of grid computing: authentication, security, data management, and resource discovery.