Government agencies worldwide adopting Linux with IBM

The implementation of Linux open source code, along with IBM's prowess, is gaining ground in government around the world.

India's National Informatics Center (NIC) has contracted IBM to deliver open solutions to India. NIC is India's premiere consulting organization in the field of Informatics Services and Information Technology applications.

Dr. Deepak Phatak, Subrao Nilekani chair professor of IT, Indian Institute, thinks the smallest villages can benefit from open source material. "India should be a net giver to the open community," he said. "The Government of India sees open computing as having the potential to drive economic development and I believe that information technology can spread to smallest of Indian towns and villages only through open standards."

Closer to home, IBM is slated to build what will become one of the top ten fastest supercomputers in the world once it completes installation at the Army Research Laboratory Major Shared Resource Center (ARL MSRC). The ARL is adding to its cache of to computers that make up its high-performance computing (HPC) systems.

The US Department of Defense (DoD) will use the 10 teraflop system (trillion floating-point operations per second) to accelerate research of sophisticated military systems. "It is now more important than ever that the DoD is equipped with the most sophisticated and agile systems," says Dave Turek, Vice President of Deep Computing for IBM. "IBM worked closely with the DoD to develop a powerful, Linux based, state-of-the-art supercomputing solution that would meet their needs and offer the reliability and ease of management to significantly increase the organization's overall performance in the breakthrough defense technologies."

The mammoth system is built with a 2,304-CPU cluster consisting of 1186 IBM eServer e325 nodes. The "brains" of the system, which each server will be equipped with, is dual-2.2 GHz AMD Opteron processors; with a Myrinet interconnect running the SUSE Linux. The HPCMO's new computer is part of "Technology Insertion 2004," a modernization push to increase the DoD's high performance computing capabilities.

Hawaii and Oklahoma are also enlisting the aid of IBM along with Linux-based operating systems. In an effort at providing its state employee snapshots of the budge, Hawaii will use DB2 and Linux as their strategic database with a WebSphere Application Server gateway.

Oklahoma will put the superior speed Linux can offer IT infrastructure to use in agencies like Child Welfare. The state's zSeries mainframes will run Linux, which will improve response time in cases of child abuse where access to sensitive information is crucial.

Even outside of the US Linux is making inroads. Canada's southernmost county, Essexis, has put its financial applications on a Linux system running DB2 and Red Hat. Essexis is one of the most agriculturally productive areas in Canada. Over 5,000MB of data -- ranging from general ledgers to accounts receivable -- is currently being managed.

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