Linux Makes a name for itself in Hollywood

By: James Cloney

Digital Domain is an advanced full-service production studio located in Venice, California providing filmography services for films such as X-Men, Fight Club, Interview with the Vampire, True Lies, Apollo 13, Dante's Peak, the Fifth Element and Titanic.

Titanic (written and directed by James Cameron) probably the most costly and dramatic of all these films was one of Digital Domain's most difficult projects.

The film, set on the Titanic during its first and final voyage across the Atlantic recreated on screen the splendor and drama of the ship and its tragic end.

During the work on Titanic the facility used approximately 350 CPUs, 200 DEC Alpha CPUs and 5 terabytes (that's a thousand billion bytes) of disk space all connected by a 100 Megabits per second network. Just to put this into perspective a current estimate of the size of all the pages on the Web is between 25 -35 terabytes. And the

requirements for the Titanic come in at just about one sixth of this! Just think of the processing power needed to access all the pages on the Web and divide by six.

A huge undertaking like this needs a huge Operating System`. Or maybe not.
Digital Domain chose Linux as the operating system to keep all those CPUs busy and manage the massive 5 terabytes of disk space. A colossal undertaking by any operating system's standard. And yet it handled all this and more.

So let's hear it for the underdog of the operating system world. And the next time you visit the cinema, just ask yourself where we would be without the open source software movement that generated Linux.