"THE MASTER OF ILLUSION in the entertainment industry,
Industrial Light & Magic (ILM)-- George Lucas's visual effects
and 3-D animation studio -- is undergoing its own metamorphosis and
sloughing off longtime partner SGI in the process.
According to Andy Hendrickson, director of research and
development, San Rafael, Calif.-based ILM is in the process of
replacing its 600 Unix-based SGI O2 workstations-- which it used to
render such characters as the gauze-clad antagonist in The Mummy,
the fearsome velociraptors in the Jurassic Park flicks and Jar-Jar
Binks in Star Wars Episode I --with Pentium Four Linux machines. It
is also replacing SGI's Unix-based Origin 2000 server with a
combination of a Pentium Four computer and Alpha processors that
will run Linux from Red Hat."
