Industrial Light Magic contemplating big Linux move

LUCAS DIGITAL division Industrial Light Magic is contemplating a rapid switch to the Linux operating system.

A presentation made at the recent Worldcon science fiction convention included an ILM presentation who told attendees that not only is his company "hiring like mad" but it is also switching to the Linux operating system fast.

It's also looking at outsourcing render time, according to the attendee who told us the above.

ILM, the attendee said, appears to have a large purse to switch to open source, and also appears to be platform agnostic as to whether it's a Hammer or an Itanium which runs the OS.

Further, said the attendee, there were suggestions at the show that ILM might move into distributed computing to take up some of the rendering load in the fure.

One piece of software ILM appears to be using internally is Houdini Select, which you can find on this Web page. Right down at the bottom you can see that it runs on a variety of platforms including Windows XP IA-64 and Linux IA-64. Can the Hammer platforms be far away, our emole asked? µ