During a Thursday morning keynote speech here at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, William Swope, vice president of Intel's Architecture Group, will talk up the role of enterprise servers in furthering the growth and potential of open source.
While Swope will likely steer clear of pitting Linux against Windows, given Intel's close ties with Microsoft, he is expected to talk up Linux's growing server market share, compared to that of Unix.
Swope is slated to highlight the high-end potential of Linux by demonstrating clustered IA-64 systems running streaming video and other numerically intensive applications. In one demonstration, Intel is expected to showcase a four-way Itanium Linux cluster running Convolo clustering software from Mission Critical Linux that is being used by the National Supercomputing Centre.
Swope is also expected to put Intel's money where its mouth is by announcing several programs and initiatives aimed at open-source developers.
Intel Developer Services is expected to unveil the Intel Early Access Service. The early access service will allow developers to build, test and debug IA-64-based open-source applications in a hosted environment for free.
Reducing server bottlenecks
Intel also will unveil Intel-developed software called Advanced Network Services for Linux, which includes load balancing, failover, and other advanced networking services designed to reduce server bottlenecks and improve uptime.
Swope also is set to announce an award that the Open Source Development Lab, of which Intel is one of the founding members, will grant to the open-source community. Every six months, the OSDL board will give a US$25,000 prize to the individual submitting the "most impactful idea" for Linux in the enterprise. <
Intel is no newcomer to Linux. Since 1998, the company has made investments in more than 10 open-source companies, including Red Hat, TurboLinux and VA Linux. Through the Intel IA-64 Fund, the company has provided funding for a number of other Linux and open-source companies.
Intel, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and NEC USA announced the formation of the OSDL in August of 2000. OSDL is designed to provide testing and development of open-source applications.
