Digital Equipment Corp is boasting that Hollywood special effects studio Digital Domain Inc used Alpha-based computer systems for virtually every frame of the blockbuster film Titantic, pitching the move as a significant win against Silicon Graphics Inc. But what DEC doesn’t say is that the Venice, California- based studios rejected DEC’s own hardware and operating systems software, going instead to Alpha clonemaker Carrera Computers Inc and choosing the Linux operating system over Digital Unix. DEC is boasting about the Alpha win from advertisements posted on its widely used Alta Vista web search engine site, saying that 200 Alpha CPUs were set onto the task of compositing the film’s special effects after Digital Domain discovered that it could process images three and a half times faster than on their Silicon Graphics systems. But Digital Domain chose not to use Digital Unix on grounds of cost and lack of flexibility according to a report in the Linux Journal. Other deciding factors included difficulties communicating with NT servers, a lack of support for unusual peripherals, and the ability to allow a large number of uses on a single system. It chose instead to run Rad Hat Software Inc’s commercial implementation of the Linux Unix-alike operating system on 105 of the machines in a 160 machine render ranch of Carrera hardware, with the other 55 systems running Windows NT. Carrera, a Newport, California Beach- based company, has specialized in high-performance Alpha systems for graphics intensive applications. The systems were connected to each other and to the rest of the facility with 100Mbps Ethernet. Digital Domain hasn’t turned its back on Silicon Graphics, and still has 350 workstations, which were also used on the project. The company said it did have some hardware compatibility problems with Linux, and found the Alpha version of Linux to have been less-tested than the equivalent Intel port, due to the relatively small Alpha Linux community. But overall, it says, the cost benefit of using Linux was overwhelmingly positive.
