That's right. The most incredible special effects in recent movie history were not created on high-end Silicon Graphics workstations running Unix. They were built on farms of industry-standard servers and workstations with Intel processors and running Red Hat Linux.

"Prior to starting production on The Lord of the Rings trilogy, we had foreseen the need for a lot of computing power," says Milton Ngan, digital operations manager at New Zealand?based Weta Digital, the studio behind the movies' stunning effects. But the company was on a fairly limited budget. "Linux opened up the possibility of running our software on a lower-cost platform. Furthermore, the major software applications used in our pipeline were also being ported to Linux."

How is Linux winning over businesses? Its low cost is attractive (ranging from free to moderately priced, depending on the level of software and services you buy). Hardware and software companies from IBM to Oracle to Pixar are now supporting Linux. And Linux now has enterprise-class strength, with features like clustering, symmetric multiprocessing, and large blocks of addressable memory. Some 14 percent of new servers ship with Linux, and that number should reach 25 percent in 2006, says market research firm IDC.

To Weta Digital's delight, performance with Linux has been exceptional. As a former user of Silicon Graphics systems and the Irix operating system (based on Unix), the company now runs its high-end applications on Linux, including Alias|Wavefront's Maya, Apple's Shake, and Pixar's RenderMan and Alfred? software that distributes rendering tasks across idle processors to maximize computing resources. Weta Digital's rendering farm, which performs the complex calculations that build 3-D models, includes more than 450 dual-processor servers. And more than 200 IBM IntelliStation workstations are used to design special effects.

Full Story