Moving Images Collection To Run On IBM And SuSE LinuxMoving Images Collection To Run On IBM And SuSE Linux

In a bid to help satiate the world's hunger for digital imagery, the Library of Congress is partnering with IBM and a number of universities to create the Moving Images Collection, a data repository and portal that will provide scientists, researchers, authors, and students access to more than 80,000 film, television, and digital-video images.

To keep costs down while still using a 64-bit computing platform that can handle resource-intensive graphics files, the University of Washington, Rutgers Universities Libraries, and the Georgia Institute of Technology Interactive Media Technology Center have chosen to develop the repository and Web portal on IBM pSeries servers running SuSE Linux Enterprise 8 with IBM Directory Server.

The universities, which received a $900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for the project, considered a few options before deciding on Linux, which is consistent with the federal government's push to do more development of open-source applications, says Jim DeRoest, assistant director of computing and communications at the University of Washington.

"We went with the pSeries over Intel-based servers because of the pSeries' scalability and reliability, rather than trying to make a cluster of Intel systems," he says. Once the project has been turned over to the Library of Congress, in about a year, "it has to be easy for them to run and manage."