The IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

 Linux Technology Center (LTC) is an organization focused on development for the Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 kernel and related open-source software

Open-source software

Open-source software is computer software that is available in source code form: the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that permits users to study, change, improve and at times also to distribute the software.Open...

 projects. In 1999, IBM created the LTC to combine its software developers interested in Linux and other open-source software into a single organization. Much of the LTC's early effort was focused on making "all of its server platforms Linux friendly"http://linuxgazette.net/issue59/correa2.html. The LTC collaborated with the Linux community to make Linux run optimally on processor architectures such as x86, mainframe

Mainframe computer

Mainframes are powerful computers used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.The term originally referred to the...

, Power

Power Architecture

Power Architecture is a broad term to describe similar RISC instruction sets for microprocessors developed and manufactured by such companies as IBM, Freescale, AMCC, Tundra and P.A. Semi...

, and more recently, the Cell Broadband Engine.

Developers in the LTC contribute to various open-source projects such as Realtime

Real-time computing

In computer science, real-time computing , or reactive computing, is the study of hardware and software systems that are subject to a "real-time constraint"— e.g. operational deadlines from event to system response. Real-time programs must guarantee response within strict time constraints...

, Serviceability

Serviceability (computer)

In software engineering and hardware engineering, serviceability is one of the -ilities or aspects...

 (including Kdump http://lse.sourceforge.net/kdump/ and SystemTap

SystemTap

In computing, SystemTap is the primary scripting language and tool for dynamically instrumenting running production Linux operating systems...

 http://sourceware.org/systemtap/), Enterprise Volume Management System

Enterprise Volume Management System

Enterprise Volume Management System is a flexible, integrated volume management software used to manage storage systems under Linux.Its features include:* Handle EVMS, Linux LVM and LVM2 volumes* Handle many kinds of disk partitioning schemes...

 (EVMS), Virtualization (using the Xen

Xen

Xen is a virtual-machine monitor providing services that allow multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same computer hardware concurrently....

 hypervisor

Hypervisor

In computing, a hypervisor, also called virtual machine manager , is one of many hardware virtualization techniques that allow multiple operating systems, termed guests, to run concurrently on a host computer. It is so named because it is conceptually one level higher than a supervisory program...

), Linux Test Project

Linux Test Project

The Linux Test Project is a body of regression tests designed to confirm the behavior of a build of the Linux kernel. According to the the project was started by SGI and is now maintained by IBM. Source code is available at http://ltp.cvs.sourceforge.net/ltp/ltp/.In Simple English terms, The...

 (LTP), Linux Standard Base

Linux Standard Base

The Linux Standard Base is a joint project by several Linux distributions under the organizational structure of the Linux Foundation to standardize the software system structure, including the filesystem hierarchy, used with Linux operating system...

(LSB) as well as projects focused on enabling Linux to use new hardware functions on IBM platforms.

LTC is a worldwide team spread across 38 locations in the world and contains more than 600 people.