From Clouds to Cars to Kitchens, Linux Making an Impact Everywhere

by Darryl K. Taft

As infotainment systems become must-haves, Linux-based platforms are making their way into our cars, with GM’s Cadillac, as well as Tesla and Toyota, already rolling them out on a limited number of models. IBM has partnered with companies such as Toyota and Continental to build open-source platforms that provide developers with application development tools to create a truly connected experience.

Billed as the “home entertainer’s ultimate refrigerator,” the new Samsung T9000 LCD Four-Door Refrigerator runs the Linux operating system and features a built-in, 10-inch LCD touch-screen display. The new appliance supports a range of applications, including calendar and weather apps, along with cloud-based note-taking app Evernote, enabling consumers to “share photos, videos, and even recipes with family and friends.”

In the June 2014 Top 500 supercomputer list, the top open-source operating system set a new record with 485 systems out of the fastest 500 running Linux. That means that Linux is inside 97 percent of the Top 500 supercomputers.

According to ABI Research, Android phones that run Linux account for just under 50 percent of the mobile market. Meanwhile, this fall, Linux die-hards are eagerly anticipating the arrival of a new Linux-based phone, as Canonical is expected to roll out its Ubuntu Touch-powered tablets and smartphones. Samsung is also expected to soon unveil a phone running on the Linux-based Tizen system.

Linux provides the innovation platform for the exponential growth of new open-source projects. According to a survey of OpenStack users conducted by the OpenStack user committee in April 2014, Linux underpins more than 90 percent of OpenStack deployments. OpenStack Compute (Nova) and OpenStack Object Storage (Swift) are two examples of OpenStack deployments running on Linux platforms.

Big data presents an enormous opportunity to make organizations more agile, efficient and competitive. To capture that opportunity, organizations require a modern information management architecture, and technologies like Hadoop and NoSQL databases, which primarily run on Linux, offer faster analyses and insight into information than x86.

All four grand slam tennis tournaments—the U.S. Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the Australian Open—utilize Linux running on IBM infrastructure to support their events, allowing them to deliver real-time information from analytics, cloud computing, mobile devices and social media—instantaneously—to millions of online fans and broadcasters around the world.

U.S. department store Bon-Ton was able to support 2.5 times more holiday season online orders as compared with its x86 environment after implementing Power Systems running Linux. The new Linux-based systems also helped to control costs, boost capacity and improve efficiency.

IBM Watson is a commercially available cognitive computing system—a system capable of continually learning and refining itself through human/computer interaction. Watson advances natural language processing through innovations in deep question and answer technology. The power behind Watson lies in software running Linux on IBM Power Systems. IBM has put Watson to work helping companies develop new applications powered by cognitive computing, including partnerships with companies in retail, health care, financial services and education.