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| | 2008 | Panasas and SpectSoft make a Linux splash at SIGGRAPH Greg Weinstein Senior Editor LOS ANGELES, Calif. -- SpectSoft, creator of open-source Linux high-end digital disk drive recorder (DDR) software, and Panasas, maker of Linux cluster file servers, joined forces at the annual SIGGRAPH conference this week to demonstrate high-performance Linux systems for the digital video and effects industries. This is Panasas's first demonstration of a system for this application, while SpectSoft, a California-based start-up, announced version 1.2 of their application, RaveHD for Linux, with an enhanced user interface. According to SpectSoft’s VP of engineering, Jason Howard, RaveHD is ideal for digital dailies. Provided as open source (including all libraries) for licensees only, the system is compatible with Slackware 9.1 and later, Red Hat 6.2 and later, MySQL, Oracle, and is generally highly compatible with most Linux distributions. It supports HD digital recording and playback in 10 and 12 bits per color per pixel at a full 24 frames per second without compression – easily over 70 Mbytes per second throughput to disk on industry standard hardware such as PCI-bus PCs. The product lists for just under $4000 per desktop. Ramona Howard, president of the family-run SpectSoft, describes the software as being fully compatible with SD, HD, HD-SDI, and HD-Dual Link SDI interfaces, supporting high-end film-quality cameras such as the Grass Valley/Thomson Vipert. The RaveHD products support standard file formats, so that customers may easily write Linux-based software to access individual frames in the video clips, or access the clip metadata (fields defined by the user) in the SQL database. The software is in use at companies such as Tippett Studios, used on Starship Troopers 2, and was used by LucasFilm on Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith. Panasas, which launched their Linux cluster storage server last November, hopes to move into the high-performance digital media arena with their announcement at the show, coupling their server with software such as RaveHD, according to their director of marketing communications J.P. Gallagher, who said, “It’s uniquely suited for rendering and post-production,” performing up to 305,000 disk operations per second on the SPEC benchmark. According to Gallagher, Panasas’ ActiveScale cluster implements a Raid 0 or 5 solution using a unique architecture, reducing overhead and taking advantage of multiple Gigabit Ethernet data paths to stripe data across separate “blades” and implement a single “realm” (namespace). The system is compatible with NFS or CIFS, and is distributed as a complete turnkey system plus binary RPM for target Linux systems, with Red Hat being the most-used platform. Gallagher describes their ActiveScale system as “cost effective, high performance, scalable, and easy to manage.” It’s currently installed at customers in the oil and gas industry, biotech (such as genome sequencing), and at Los Alamos National Labs, where it is part of their 200 terabyte top-20 speed “Lightning” supercomputer cluster. In other words, it's a mature, Linux-compatible system; only the film industry application is new. The annual international conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques is produced by ACM, the international professional society on computing, and its SIGGRAPH special interest group, said to be the largest SIG-produced conference in the world. 25,000 professionals and students from six continents are expected to gather for the world-class technical conference, trade show, emerging technologies exhibition, art show, and juried animation festival, including the three-day exhibition of products and services for high-end computer graphics this week. Light your LAMP Greg Weinstein Senior Editor Are you a webmeister? Do you handle cutting-edge Information Technology (I.T.)? Are you an open-source fan? Then you already know about this. For everyone else: a sea change is well on its way to dominating the backrooms of corporate web sites – and is likely to become critically important to those working on the “next great application.” Web 2.0 is a generic catch-phrase for everything new on the Internet, referring to a new way of distributing software. Instead of passive web sites (like viewing pages of a newspaper), or CD/DVDs you install on your computer (like Microsoft Office), there is perhaps a more compelling technique: the application is on a web server somewhere else, and you use your PC and web browser to access it, without any installation. To get to this hallowed ground, many developers and I.T. professionals are choosing a new environment for the back-end, where the work really occurs. This is known by the acronym LAMP – Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Linux is the Unix-like operating system written from scratch by Linus Torvalds. Apache is a web server – that is, the software that listens and replies when you click on something on a web page. MySQL is an implementation of Structured Query Language, the standardized way of storing, organizing, and retrieving data from a back-end computer. And PHP (originally “personal home page”) is a scripting language – a lightweight way for semi-programmers to automate a series of operations. The key to all of this is “open source.” These tools are available free of charge (if you don’t need support), and are updated and maintained by a plethora of software gurus, desiring to create better and more reliable tools through a group process often without any compensation, other than the glory involved. If you go to a web or internet hosting company, chances are that they will be able to provide you a LAMP environment for creating and maintaining not only your web site, but also developing and distributing your applications – now in the form of “smart web pages.” There are still many other permutations of ways to create Web back-end plants – Microsoft’s BackOffice suite, Unix and various other Unix clones under a variety of names (for instance, Solaris from Sun Microsystems), and other more specialized tools. But more and more, you will be seeing web sites (such as Yahoo!) created using the LAMP model. SDK for iPhone: Move to Include I always thought that Apple got a pass from dazzled media over the closed nature of the iPhone. For all of Apple’s talk of being consumer-centric and user-friendly, the basic design of the iPhone made it by far the most closed mobile environment of all. You couldn’t even get a ringtone download until mid-2007, and the selection of those tones on iTunes was truly pathetic. Steve Jobs trotted out a laundry list of excuses for the lack of third-party inclusion (viruses, bringing down the AT&T network, etc.) but none of it really explained why I couldn’t then download a decent game or ringtone. Apple apparently is moving toward a greater spirit of inclusion and true user-friendliness. Not only did the company announce that it was lowering the price of its DRM-free iTunes Plus tracks, but it also revealed that an SDK would be available to third party developers for both the iPhone and the iPod Touch. According to Jobs, the kit will be available in February because Apple is trying to ensure two things at once. First, it wants a development kit that gives third parties a good experience and access to as much of the multi-touch interface as possible. Second, they are working to ensure that these third-party apps do not compromise the security of the phone. Jobs seems a little touchy on this matter, as he goes out of his way to rationalize his rationalizations for keeping such a tight leash on his coveted new tech hit. What does this mean for developers and the mobile eco-system? Well, it is very good news for the two million or so of those who do own the phone, but I am not sure it has that big of an impact on the rest of the mobile world. As has often been the case with the iPhone, its influence seems indirect. By giving users and developers a lush and flexible interface and palette, the iPhone obliquely pressures the rest of the mobile community to follow suit. Potentially, this new SDK will be tied to an update of the basic iPhone platform. Realistically, you can expect that Jobs will wish to retain as much control of the environment as possible. The unknown factor: what will new and updated platforms, such as Google’s reputed Android and Microsoft’s Mobile Windows, be doing to attract those same developers? iPhone Gaming – Coolest On The Block? Greg Weinstein Senior Editor With only a fraction of the audience of any other mobile platform the iPhone is attracting dedicated development the way a chic new mall with little traffic sucks in upscale retailers. Everyone wants a piece of the hype, and so branded media and many marquee Web sites are pouring iPhone Web apps into the mix just this past week. The most visible, PopCap Game’s signature game Bejeweled, rolled out some months ago for the iPhone; DailyMotion opened a section of its streaming video portal formatted for the mobile Safari browser. Both releases are some of the best examples of what is possible under the iPhone’s Web-only platform for third party digital media developers. As the original announcement for Bejeweled points out, it is challenging to develop games for a mobile platform as Web-only apps. The Bejeweled game for the iPhone is free, but other PopCap games either come with ad support or as for-pay downloads. Making a subscription gateway for a game that players can’t even keep locally on their phone could be a tough model to sell, even to those Bejeweled-addled soccer moms. Web-based games like Bejeweled also suffer on this platform from a lack of audio. Even via its modest speaker, the iPhone has good sound, so current third party apps miss an entire, vital dimension of game design. This hasn’t stopped other smartphone vendors, such as Samsung, offering a demo of Bejeweled on their MobilePC platforms. Despite the design and business model limitations the iPhone platform has become the hip place to be. Some of the top mobile marketing agencies tell me they are already developing iPhone-friendly sites for their clients, because there is hip cred to be had from rolling out a campaign or a branded destination even for a few hundred thousand people. By loudly announcing an iPhone presence, these companies somehow are telling mobile content surfers that they “get it” in that new and exciting way that the iPhone itself “gets” mobile users. I would argue that there is more than a simple “halo effect” going on here. Whether or not these iPhone products reach a vast audience on such a minority platform, the design decisions that the iPhone platform encourages on these apps will only serve to improve mobile content development generally. Both Digg and DailyMotion deployments use very clean and efficient designs to offer users vast catalogs of user-generated material in compact formats. By designing for this platform, content developers are exploring intersting ways of making the phone a better content browsing platform. Apple’s recent advertising campaigns promoting the gameability of iPhone and iPod models points to their desire to push this even more. Gaming may be the “coolest” draw to shifting the all-important teenage-to-young-adult market to their smart devices. Perhaps that’s why, according to an AT&T manager supervising one region’s corporate direct wireless stores, that some 40% of all their handset sales are iPhones. About The Editor Greg Weinstein has been a professional engineer and writer for over 15 years, specializing in consumer software, web products, and consumer electronics. He has previously written two books and numerous articles for for Computer Graphics, Web Developers’ Journal, PC Register, MSX World, and more. A Tennessee native, he resides in Silicon Valley. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | WEB SEARCH | |