Linux is a "Toy" operating system ...
computerworld.com
Linux gushes savings for oil giant
Switch from IBM saves Hess nearly $2M
Saddled with low oil prices and a need to cut costs, global oil giant Amerada Hess Corp. is saving millions of dollars by replacing a costly IBM supercomputer with high-end parallel clusters running Linux, the free Unix variant that some CIOs still regard as a wild card.
A 32-node Linux cluster, called a Beowulf supercomputer, lets the company render detailed 3-D images of the seafloor from terabytes of data.
The $130,000 Beowulf system performs the task in about the same time — two weeks — as the 32-node IBM SP2 system running AIX that the company paid $2 million to lease for three years, said Vic Forsyth, Amerada Hess' Houston-based manager of geophysical systems.
Though the company could have saved at least hundreds of thousands of dollars by opting to set up Windows NT clusters, porting its Unix rendering application would have been a huge chore, Forsyth said. The application is about 2 million lines of code and might have taken years to rewrite for Windows, he said. "We thought about that for three nanoseconds." When oil prices reached the lowest point of the 1990s late last year, Forsyth said, the New York-based, $6.6 billion oil company made the leap to Linux, even though many CIOs still regard the operating system as too untested to be trusted with even comparatively meager jobs like file serving.
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Linux-based Beowulf clusters have become popular supercomputers at several national laboratories, government agencies and universities. But they have been rare in the private sector because CIOs have only begun to consider Linux a reliable, supportable operating system.
The MSFT cult was right all along. Linux IS a "Toy" operating system.
Linux ... we've only just begun. |
