Stories about: SGI

Blender is a popular open-source software package used for modeling and rendering 3-D images. Computerworld recently spoke via e-mail with Tom Musgrove, one of the 35 active core developers on the Blender project. Besides explaining how the tool is used by 3-D artists, Musgrove also addressed complaints about the Blender user interface and discussed directions for future development.

While the kernel 2.6.23 development cycle has not yet run its course, things are getting close enough to the end that it makes sense to start looking at the overall statistics for this release. As of this writing (shortly after 2.6.23-rc6 came out), just over 6,200 non-merge changesets had been added to the mainline kernel repository. These changesets came from 854 developers - a slightly smaller number than we saw for 2.6.22. Just over 350 of those developers contributed one single changeset.

As the number of Linux kernel contributors continues to grow, core developers are finding themselves mostly managing and checking, not coding, said Greg Kroah-Hartman, maintainer of USB and PCI support in Linux and co-author of Linux Device Drivers, in a talk at the Linux Symposium in Ottawa last week.

Once the domain of monolithic, multimillion-dollar supercomputers from Cray and IBM, HPC (high-performance computing) is now firmly within reach of today's enterprise, thanks to the affordable computing power of clustered standards-based Linux and Microsoft servers running commodity Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron processors. Many early movers are in fact already capitalizing on in-house HPC, assembling and managing small-scale clusters on their own.

Part of the fun of working with truly large machines is that one gets to discover new scalability surprises before anybody else. So the SGI folks often have more fun than many of the rest of us. Their latest discovery has to do with the number of kernel threads which, on a 4096-processor system, leads to some interesting kernel behaviour.

LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit speaker Jeremy Allison explains some tricky details of Linux/Windows interoperability, what the Novell/Microsoft deal really does for interoperability, and a vision for a future easy-to-administer network filesystem.

A little less than a year ago, Internet Brands, which operates Web sites for big ticket purchases such as cars, homes and mortgages, was looking to rid itself of the big ticket hardware in its data centre.

Silicon Graphics plans to offer Microsoft's high-performance computing (HPC) cluster software on systems that have until now been primarily focused on meeting the needs of HPC Linux users.

Of the products we've tested, Arkeia Network Backup had the longest lists of supported operating-system clients and storage devices and methods, a testament to Arkeia's background as an early open source backup application, based on Linux.

This year in storage seems to be ending exactly as it started -- very busily. And it's a pattern that will continue in 2007, no doubt about that.

Professional video editing software may cost thousands of dollars but one open source project, Jahshaka, is aiming to change the game by providing all the features in a real time, networked environment. Jahshaka is a video and film compositing, editing and special effects system that uses hardware rendering to give users real time interactivity. Computerworld spoke with the project's founder, Jah Shaka, about the little application that could change the content creation game for good.