By Rachel Chalmers

Linux has already won more converts this year, but plans for exploiting the open source operating system vary from vendor to vendor. Unlike Dell and HP, which have decided to ship Red Hat Linux with their hardware, Silicon Graphics Inc is taking the do- it-yourself approach to the open source community. Currently I would say we’re doing development inhouse, said Dave McAllister, strategic technologist for SGI. He said that while the company will be reviewing what the various distributions of Linux bring to the table, SGI wants to do more than just throw a CD in the box. We want to be part of the open source community, and we hope the community understands that, McAllister said. In particular, he said, SGI can bring its traditional strength in scalability and performance to the Linux community, as well as its experience in supporting Microsoft Networking (SMB) through Samba. For example, McAllister points out that there are limitations to Beowulf, the Linux clustering software. Because it’s a clustering environment, Beowulf doesn’t have the capacity for sharing memory through a single application, he observed, we currently, with Irix, scale single-system images into terabyte space. That’s not to say that SGI wants to tread on open source toes: Our job is to live within Linux, not to change it, he says. Like other Unix vendors now shipping the upstart operating system, McAllister insists that SGI’s various OS properties – Irix, Unicos for Cray, an NT license and now Linux – are all very complementary. The way he sees it, NT is dominant on the desktop, Irix is dominant in high-end technical computing and Cray rules supercomputing, leaving SGI with a hole in low-end low-cost servers. That doesn’t mean Linux isn’t going to go on and up, he warned. SGI will have a team of people working full-time on Linux and McAllister says the company will provide same level of support for Linux as for NT and Irix.

VA Research

Meanwhile five-year-old Linux pioneer, VA Research Linux Systems gave a heads-up of big announcements to come. Since getting a cash injection from Sequoia Capital last November (CI No 3,539), the Mountain View, California-based company has assembled a management team and board of directors to match its new station in life. Sequoia’s Doug Leone has joined the board, as has open source guru Eric Raymond, a longtime friend of the company. VA’s director of marketing, Chris DiBona, warns that SGI’s slant on Beowulf should be taken with a grain of salt. It’s important to remember what a cluster does, he says, it takes a problem that is easily broken up into parts. Some problems don’t lend themselves to that, DiBona agrees. Weather simulations and other problems in complex fluid dynamics are the classic examples. You’re better off with a shared memory system for those, he concedes. Rendering and codebreaking, on the other hand, don’t need shared memory and run as well under Linux as on a supercomputer – but far more cheaply. SGI understands supercomputing, don’t get me wrong, DiBona concludes, but we deliver clusters that are ready to go out of the box.