The Power of Linux (page 3 of 3)

"The end result is a two-by performance improvement over Linux on 64-bit x86," Connors says. "And while SPARC continues to lose ground, POWER grows 34 percent year after year."

Migrating Penguins

The Princeton genetics database and the MIC project have one thing in common: The technologists leveraged expertise in other platforms or architectures to seamlessly move into Linux on POWER. DeRoest's team at the University of Washington applied AIX on POWER expertise to Linux on POWER.

Agnew's team at Rutgers applied Sun Solaris on SPARC expertise to Linux on POWER. And Welsh's team at Princeton applied Linux on x86 expertise to Linux on POWER. The central theme is that Linux is close enough to UNIX and runs on enough common platforms that it makes for an easy migration path.

Welsh says the upgrade from Linux on x86 to Linux on POWER was transparent. "One of our main goals was to get a platform that ran a 'standard' version of Linux (Red Hat, SUSE, etc.) rather than a customized, off-the-beaten-track version," he says. "That was one of the primary reasons we chose IBM. From our developers' perspectives, the technology is the same, just the box is different."

On the MIC site, collaboration drives much of the move to open standards. The site consists of a union catalog and an archive directory, which together comprise the largest database of moving images in the world. The union catalog, under development at the Rutgers site, brings together hundreds of thousands of records of moving images—films, videos, newsreels and the like—with a description of the owners of those archives.

It enables archive owners to write the metadata descriptions of their film or tape resources. The directory, under development at the University of Washington site, is a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) technology that allows users to search and retrieve the information at the union catalog, whether or not they can access the actual archives.

In addition, the Georgia Tech development focuses on the Web portals and other front-end elements of the site. Agnew says a main driver in the choice of Linux on POWER was to pave the way for future work on the project.

"For a project like MIC that could potentially scale into 3,000 different organizations with multiple archives or collections with millions of individual listings and millions of hits per month, we needed something that could scale," she says.

"But we also wanted something that we could easily migrate and replicate, if necessary." Jane Johnson, MIC project manager and the overseer of the project for the LoC, says, "I continue to be amazed by how well the project goes. The standards-based approach has enabled this to run as smoothly as it has."

A cardinal rule of collaboration is to establish common ground before getting down to business. Power Architecture runs on just about every platform, from Nintendo game cubes to Apple Macs to midrange servers to large supercomputer clusters. Linux runs on everything from embedded systems to mainframes.