The amazing PATENTED IBM Multi-Pipe! I wanted to post to let 9fans know about an exciting new software patent that was just issued by the US patent office. United States Patent #8,380,765 is for an incredible new Plan 9 related supercomputing technology called the Multi-pipe. If you want to know what a Multi-pipe is, its simple:
The basic idea of a multi-pipe is a natural evolution of the original Unix pipes concept, updated to the modern networking era. Instead of just having a single reader and a single writer on the ends of a pipe, a Multi-pipe allows you to multiplex readers and writers. This upgrade to unix pipes - especially when combined with network transparency such as that provided by 9P - lets you do cluster processing techniques like fan-out, fan-in, using very similar semantics to traditional unix pipes, but with arbitrarily complex topologies of multiple readers and writers. The Blue Gene team wrote about multipipes: "The result dramatically simplified the architecture and improved overall system performance. It became clear that multipipes were a useful primitive for the construction of applications and other system services." (Quote from the IBM HARE Final Research Report RC25241 (W1111-212) November 28 2011 Computer Science) I believe the idea of a Multi-pipe is a natural progression of basic unix pipes, and this amazing Patented Invention of IBM's is something that I think everyone should know about. In fact, I am so excited by the Multi-pipe that I have made an effort to allow all Plan 9 users the ability to get the same benefits as offered by this amazing Patented Invention that was purely the result of IBM's original research and innovation. Because IBM has a patent on this technology, it wasn't safe to just try to put out my own version and offer it to the world. IBM has a lot of lawyers - and probably some of those lawyers were trained by my late father, John A. Kidwell. He taught intellectual property law at the University of Wisconsin for a long time, and he gave me a lot of good advice. One piece of his good advice was that you never, ever, ever should disagree with the IBM lawyers. So, I hope that everything in this post shows that I am in complete agreement with all of the opinions of IBM's legal team, whatever they are. Anyway, I thought the world deserved to have a non-patent encumbered version of Multi-pipes that could deliver very similar functionality, but not conflict with IBM's Patented Invention. So, I used /dev/timemachine to send some software back in time to 2009, before I could see any trace of IBM Multi-pipes. I sent the Iosrv and Hubfs software back to the sources server between 7/01/09 and 8/01/09 (you can check the dump) so in this way I thought I could avoid any potential issues with IBM's legal team. I hope that anyone who is interested in US Patent 8380765: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=8380765.PN.&OS=PN/8380765&RS=PN/8380765 Might be interested in a free open source alternative which should be free of any patent licensing issues in relation to this patent. -Ben Kidwell "mycroftiv" PS - I have tremendous personal respect and admiration for the individuals who worked on the Blue Gene project. As a hobbyist programmer with a basement of junky old computers, it is exciting to feel a kind of mental kinship with others who are working at a vastly larger scale on more significant projects. I hope someday to meet some of you and we can talk Plan 9 and it will be very friendly. I am an old hippie who is full of peace and love. I do truly love the Patented Invention of multi-pipes so my use of a time machine to send similar software back in time shouldn't be taken as anything other than attempt to give a good idea to the community in a way which is free of patent issues.
