Hollywood ready for mass shift to Linux for sFX

Linux Is Going to Hollywood, and IBM Wants a Lift
By Adam Pasick

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Hollywood's latest rising star is Linux, the upstart operating system that serves as an alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) Windows.

And as studios move to embrace the freely available Linux for their special effects and animation needs, technology giants are taking notice. On Wednesday, International Business Machines Corp.(NYSE:IBM - news) is set to announce its Linux Digital Studio package, made up of workstations, server computers and data storage machines.

Linux has already helped create special effects-laden blockbusters like ``Titanic'' and the animated hit ``Shrek.'' It even landed on-screen in the film ``AntiTrust,'' which featured programmers battling against a software behemoth headquartered in the Pacific Northwest.

Offscreen, among the big names considering a shift to Linux are Pixar Animation Studios Inc.(Nasdaq:PIXR - news), creators of the ``Toy Story'' movies, as well as George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic special effects studio.

Steve Canepa, IBM's vice president for media and entertainment, said Big Blue was ideally suited to quench movie studios' Linux thirst.

``Over the next 12 to 18 months, this market segment is going to move en masse to Linux,'' he said. ``They need to move fast, they need support and they need simplicity.''

etc: etc: etc:

DM

etc, etc, the supercluster industry, acedemia, oil exploration, etc, etc.
About the only high-tech industry slow to adopt Linux is the PC industry. I suspect Linux on the high end (servers) and the low end (cell phones, PDA's) will cause PC builders to wake up and smell the source.
[link|http://www.zdnet.com.au/biztech/enterprise/story/0,2000010343,20254640,00.htm|
IBM talks up Linux love affair]
By Rachel Lebihan, ZDNet Australia
15 August 2001
....
"At IBM we are comitted to embrace Linux across everything we do...because Linux is the only operating system that you can safely say will run on architecture that has not yet been invented," he added.

Wladawsky-Berger pins his claims that Linux is the fastest growing operating system on research conducted by IDC and he says there are four key marketplaces that have embraced Linux, the first being the world of consolidation.

"One of the capabilities of Linux is that it makes it very easy to distribute and consolidate into larger servers," he said. For example, Korean Airlines recently made the decision to consolidate some of its major distributor applications, such as those that assign pilot schedules, into IBM's zseries suite of servers. Web sites that pilots access to find out when they're flying all now run through Linux, according to Wladawsky-Berger .

Linux also is surperb in clusters, such as the big supercomputing clusters used in Universities and research laboratories, Wladawsky-Berger said. "In Linux clusters we have a growing number of customers," he said, pointing to Shell which is already doing very powerful analyses on Linux clusters. Also, just last week, the National Science Foundation combined the power of four supercomputers placed at different locations with linked clusters. "The combined power of the supercomputers is 13.5 terraflops," Wladawsky-Berger said. "That's a lot of terraflops."

Another marketplace keen top adopt Linux is the world of distributed enterprise, and Australian car rental company Thrify is an example of a company cutting costs by installing Linux-based servers, Wladawsky-Bergern said. The fourth marketplace is the world of appliances. "The number of customers here is growing as more and more applications are coming to light," he added.

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