" ILM has created special effects for eight of the top 15 box office hits of all time, winning 14 Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects and 16 Technical Achievement Awards. The technical effects studio has switched from using RISC-Unix workstations from SGI to using Intel-based Dell systems running Linux for the bulk of its animation and special effects work, said Cliff Plumer, ILM's chief technology officer. As part of the conversion, ILM recently deployed 600 Pentium 4 workstations. "The Intel workstations that were deployed were probably 20 percent of the price of SGI workstations we bought a few years ago," Plumer said. "Performance-wise, they are about three times as fast." ILM began experimenting with Intel-based workstations when working on "Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace," and used them extensively in "Episode II: Attack of the Clones." The conversion process took about nine months, Plumer said. The company is currently using these machines on "Harry Potter and the Chamber or Secrets" and "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines." Along with replacing its workstations, ILM also has installed a 1,000-processor render farm based around AMD Athlon processors and a server cluster built with Compaq Alpha processors. Source: News and ILM