Saturday, August 21, 2010

A Glimpse of Ubuntu Desktops in the Financial World


I worked from Chicago today, meeting up with my buddy Kees and doing my daily hacking from a Caribou Coffee shop with free WiFi on the river and at the foot of the Willis Tower (previously known as the Sears Tower).

Earlier this year, I had the great privilege to visit the Weta Digital Studios in Wellington, New Zealand, where their Ubuntu-based cluster of 35,000 nodes renders blockbuster movies, including Avatar and King Kong.

And today I visited another place, as absolutely amazing as Weta Digital, in terms of what they're doing with Ubuntu... After our work was done, Kees took me to meet one of his friends, a programmer and sys-admin at a financial firm near the Chicago Board of Trade (now merged with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange).

These guys easily have 35,000 square inches of LCD monitors running Ubuntu desktops, displaying in real time thousands of graphs, metrics, monitors, and statuses. Hundreds of multi-head desktops running 8.04 to 10.04, attached to 17" to 42" Samsung LCDs, Ubuntu logos everywhere I turned!

There is no doubt that across both Server and Desktop, Ubuntu is proving itself in enterprise environments. Linux is here, there, everywhere, and Ubuntu is a very important player, helping make that happen. I take great pride in what we're achieving together!

:-Dustin
p.s. Some readers have followed my hiking and travel adventures to Scotland (both times), New Zealand, and others. Many of these adventures have little (if anything) to do with Linux or Ubuntu, so I've moved all of my travel to a different blog, theKirklands.net, which is not syndicated on planet.ubuntu.com. You are welcome to follow my travel stories there. If you do, you have a lot of catching-up to do! ;-)

4 comments:

  1. We want photos! See if you can get your buddy to take a couple :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Very interesting, thanks for posting.

    I have to say that I'll be sorry not to see your hiking and travel adventures on Planet Ubuntu. For me Planet Ubuntu is a way of getting to know (in a small way) some other Ubuntu contributors, and I found those posts among the most interesting.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I really appreciate that, Matthew :-) I had to move my travel posts off of planet.ubuntu for a couple of reasons:
    1) the subject -- usually not Ubuntu-related
    2) the volume -- I'm posting nearly 1 per day right now
    3) the author -- my wife, Kim, is penning about half of the posts about our travels

    You're welcome to subscribe to the Atom/RSS feed at:
    http://www.thekirklands.net/search/label/travel

    Cheers,
    :-Dustin

    :-Dustin

    ReplyDelete
  4. There is no doubt that across both Server and Desktop, Ubuntu is proving itself in enterprise environments.

    ReplyDelete

Please do not use blog comments for support requests! Blog comments do not scale well to this effect.

Instead, please use Launchpad for Bugs and StackExchange for Questions.
* bugs.launchpad.net
* stackexchange.com

Thanks,
:-Dustin