Linux in Dallas at the SEG

[Alan Jackson]

I was in Dallas this week for the Society of Exploration Geophysicists
meeting. A few interesting Unix/Linux items to report.

I spoke with the guys in the Sun booth about their desktop (Mad Hatter).
It is currently certified for Suse, though Redhat is in the works.
Curiously, Landmark (one of the two big geophysical workstation
software houses - part of Halliburton) requires Redhat 7.3, if you can
imagine. A lot of version and distro issues in this space. High end
3D graphics apps are pretty sensitive to version and hardware, and I
predict that will slow Linux in displacing Sun in this space.

I also spoke with a Schlumberger subsidiary, Petrel, that sells a very
popular Windows reservoir modeling front end. I asked if it would
run under Wine, and they told me that they were finishing up their
Linux port. 

Everyone had nice Beowulf or LSF clusters : Sun, IBM, and a bunch of
new Linux startups. I got a clear impression that people are becoming
quite disenchanted with the Itanium 64 bit chip, and are moving to
the AMD Opteron 64 bit for clusters. IBM had a rather nice blade
system which could take whatever you want, AMD, Intel, or other. And
I saw a Sun system perform much like an SGI. So things are continuing to
progress.

Old news perhaps, but Linux was very much in evidence. Companies that had
been trying to port to Windows have dropped that and gone to Linux instead.
The basic reasoning is "If I want cheap hardware, why not do the easy
port to Linux instead of the hard port to Windows?".

-- 
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| Alan K. Jackson            | To see a World in a Grain of Sand      |
| alan at ajackson.org          | And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,         |
| www.ajackson.org           | Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand |
| Houston, Texas             | And Eternity in an hour. - Blake       |
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