The slashdot summary has the wrong numbers. The actual article which slashdot quotes is contradictory. Its starts by saying:
"Tianhe-1A has set a new performance record of 2.507 petaflops, as measured by the Linpack benchmark, making it the fastest system in China and in the world today."
and then one paragraph later it gives the same numbers as the slashdot summary.

Other articles (from other sites) are claiming theoretical peak performance of 4 Petaflops (from an Nvidia source) and sustained petaflops of 2.5.

"tend" is not a scientific term. you forget that if background radiation was uniform, instead of just "tend"-ing to be uniform, you wouldn't be sitting on this planet here typing your comment basking in the morning sun.

For those of you looking to try out some of the editors Rob mentioned (namely Sam and ACME) - the most recent port of those applications to Linux/BSD/OSX is maintained at the plan 9 port page by Russ Cox - although it would be wise to read the papers before trying the executables.

There's also a recently reactivated project to bring Plan 9 filesystems and namespace concepts to Linux which is maintained over on Sourceforge.

there is no gilt but there is no guilt, since there are gems on nearly every page(!)

Speaking as the person who started linuxbios and runs the project from here at LANL, I thought I would mention a few things.

3 second boot. Trust me, it's nice. And no matter how fast you make your boot, mine will probably always be faster, since you'll always be stuck with that crazy BIOS doing all that unnecessary work so that DOS will run.

3 second boot: it's nice but it's not our primary reason for doing this. We need to replace the BIOS
because of its many stupidities:
- zeroing memory on boot, so you can never REALLY know what happened when your machine crashed
- Those 'no keyboard, hit F1 to continue' messages on nodes that have no keyboard. Think this is only happening on old machines? Guess again! It happens even now on a rack of Compaq DL360 machines we just bought. Every once in a while, they ignore the 'no keyboard' bios setting. Imagine trying to deal with this if you had 256 nodes with no display. No fun.
- Current BIOSes allow no good way to boot without disk, floppy, or CDROM. I'm well aware of PXE, but the many defects of that standard make it only partially useful.
- BIOSes are getting worse. Intel's next-generation BIOS, the EFI, will require that you have a FAT-32 formatted partition somewhere, and as part of the boot process you will have to run CHKDSK. Nice, Huh? If you have a strong stomach download the 400-page standard, read it, and then wonder why this is better than just loading Linux from flash ... oh, and of course, EFI only works on one architecture; LinuxBIOS already works on two, and PowerPC is on the horizon.

Our main use of LinuxBIOS is for clusters. That said, I have a LinuxBIOS machine as my desktop and it is really nice. When you're doing kernel work you tend to reboot now and then, and LinuxBIOS takes the pain away.

Even cooler: we have an 8 MB Millenium Disk On Chip on one of our clusters. Ollie Lho and David Woodhouse worked out how to make the last 7MB into a root partition. We put the Scyld root file system onto that partition, so that the nodes boot up right into the Scyld cluster environment. Voila, silicon cluster nodes. Life is much easier.

See http://www.linuxlabs.com/linuxbios for a ompany that will be selling these as cluster nodes. Also see http://www.lnxi.com for another use of LinuxBIOS. For other systems that boot Linux from flash, you can check out synergy, CSPI, and API.

For an embedded use, booting in 3 seconds is pretty helpful. Do you really want to wait 15-30 seconds for your stereo to come up? I've talked to a few companies that want to use this for set-top boxes, and one that is probably going to use it for a CD player.

For a really interesting embedded use, check out http://www.cachier.com

OpenBoot: Yes, if you don't mind writing all your own protocol stacks, drivers, etc., etc., all of which Linux will do better, then go for it. But we've found here that Linux makes a beautiful bootstrap. We currently only boot Linux from Linux, but both Plan 9 and OpenBSD are in the works. Linux is a good bootstrap.

I've only scratched the surface here for reasons and uses of LinuxBIOS. I hope this helps a bit.