LinuxPlanet: Case Study: Clusters and Image Processing

Mar 18, 2002, 16:00 (6 Talkback[s])

"In the early days of ImageLinks, the software ran on a network of a dozen SGI Indigo 2 systems with R10000 processors. This network was managed over Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), a networking technology that can achieve data-transfer rates of 10Gbps, using an SGI R8000 four-processor Challenge server. This collection of processors and networking was extremely high-end equipment for the time. ImageLinks had to have a computing powerhouse to accomplish such processor- and bandwidth-intensive tasks.

"Mark and some of the other technical folk at ImageLinks were experimenting with Linux at home. They began wondering how the application would run on a set of Linux boxes instead of on the SGIs. Their theory was that they would not make much of a gain. However, if the result was comparable, a move to Linux could save them thousands of dollars a year on software and licenses.

"There was only one way to find out. They had to give it a try..."

Complete Story

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