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A letter from Terra Soft's CEO, "One year later ..."
Yellow Dog Linux Enthusiasts, A year ago June, I delivered two emails to this Announce list, both concerning Apple's stated (and now nearly complete) transition to the Intel architecture and how Terra Soft, as the provider of the leading Power Linux OS, was responding. With this email, I bring closure to this year of transition, sharing with you a summary of the transformation of our company and foreshadowing of good things to come. A time for refocus. In retrospect, we enjoyed our position as a unique Apple Proprietary Solutions Provider, Value Added Reseller. In the same respect, I realize now we had become comfortable there, not pursuing our full potential as an HPC Linux engineering firm. Through a number of introspective team meetings, we redefined our core competencies, rediscovered what we enjoy doing, and then determined how best to profit from the marriage of these two. As such, we are moving ahead with focus on Board Support Packages, provision of Integrated Solutions, and application development. Board Support Packages. We rediscovered and have now more fully embraced our expertise in the development of Board Support Packages (BSPs). As such, we remain the first and only provider of a commercial Linux operating system for the IBM Cell processor through our work with Mercury Computer. Just this past week we completed the Yellow Dog Linux v5.0 BSP for Mercury, offering advanced support for their BladeCenter Cell blades. We will continue to work with Mercury to provide a Cell Linux OS for each of their products as their Cell line unfolds (http://mc.com/products/boards.cfm). We have also completed a Yellow Dog Linux v5.0 BSP for Themis (http://www.themis.com) in support of the 'TPPC64', the industry's first 6U VMEbus SBC built upon the IBM 970FX (G5) processor. Integrator VAR. Our relationship with IBM has gained both breadth and depth, granting us champions and support across several divisions. We now resell the IBM p5 series Power rackmounts and IBM BladeCenter JS21 blades which provide an incredible 4x performance density improvement over the former Apple Xserve product line (http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/products/ibm/bladecente...) We are now providing quotes for the Mercury Cell blades and associated, optimized Cell libraries. With a forthcoming product line that includes a high performance 1U rackmount and accelerator card, we firmly believe Cell holds a strong position in the near HPC future. APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT In 2005 Terra Soft returned to its roots of software development with the release of Y-Bio v1.1. This full featured gene sequence analysis suite suite (http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/products/y-bio/) is now OEM'd by Penguin Computing and resold by Scalable Informatics. Y-HPC v2.0 is in development with slated launch at SC2006 this November. This fully redeveloped product moves to bridge the Power and x86 gap as the world's first commercial, cross-architecture cluster construction suite. With an immediate focus on the heterogeneous BladeCenter offerings, Y-HPC will grow to support a wide variety of x86 and Power compute nodes. As promised, Yellow Dog Linux is refocused on the desktop with a pending fall release of the consumer v5.0 product. Built upon the FC5 base, YDL v5.0 will be made available through YDL.net accounts and the public mirrors with less emphasis on a shipping, box product. While we can't let the dog out of the bag just yet, we can state that YDL has never looked so good. HPC CLUSTERING Under contract with a currently non-disclosed customer, this August Terra Soft completed the construction of a 3000 sq-ft supercomputing facility as an expansion to its Northern Colorado headquarters. Able to house greater than 2000 servers, the immediate contracted cluster will be comprised of more than 4000 Power cores. Running Yellow Dog Linux, Y-HPC, and Y-Bio, this cluster will provide realworld bioinformatics research for key DOE and University labs with the close of the year. --------------- As you can see from the scope of this review, we have been very busy. So much so, that we may have appeared relatively quiet from the outside. If the reference to the "lull before the storm" holds a water, then I would close by warning that we are about to unleash a storm. Sincerely, Kai Staats, CEO Terra Soft Solutions _______________________________________________ media-relations mailing list media-relations@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com http://lists.terrasoftsolutions.com/mailman/listinfo/medi... (Log in to post comments)
A letter from Terra Soft's CEO, "One year later ..." Posted Sep 12, 2006 17:52 UTC (Tue) by leandro (subscriber, #1460) [Link] Nothing much here for the desktop user; I guess the desktop PowerPC is all but dead, save for the Genesi guys.
A letter from Terra Soft's CEO, "One year later ..." Posted Sep 12, 2006 19:22 UTC (Tue) by Alan_Hicks (subscriber, #20469) [Link] Of course it's dead. Apple was the only game in town selling PPC for desktop use, and now that they are no longer doing so, TerraSoft has to refocus. It can't be easy for them. Once they held an enviable position as being the "Red Hat of the PPC world" if I can coin a phrase. In a manor of speaking, they still hold onto this role, but they have had to switch gears from selling their product to desktop end-users to business consumers.
Personally, I think it could go either way. If IBM's PPC offerings take off in the high-end corporate world, TerraSoft stands to make a lot of money. If it doesn't (or even if it does and people don't like TerraSoft's offerings) they'll sink like a stone. In this regard, they are very much at the mercy of IBM's PPC line, and I don't know what they can do to foster adoption of this technology.
Outside of that, they would have to make drastic changes like moving into the x86 world to try to remain a viable company with a product people want to purchase.
A letter from Terra Soft's CEO, "One year later ..." Posted Sep 12, 2006 21:45 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] I can't see IBM pushing PPC on the desktop, there's just no compelling advantage, no reason not to use AMD64 processors instead. Don't bet your business on it.
A letter from Terra Soft's CEO, "One year later ..." Posted Sep 12, 2006 22:14 UTC (Tue) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link] I think Alan was talking about Power5 systems, rather than desktopmachines. It would be interesting to see a company thrive selling Linux products and services to a low-volume high-end market. I bet it can be done, but I don't know of any huge success stories at the moment.
A letter from Terra Soft's CEO, "One year later ..." Posted Sep 13, 2006 0:43 UTC (Wed) by jebba (✭ supporter ✭, #4439) [Link] > Apple was the only game in town selling PPC for desktop use, and now that> they are no longer doing so, TerraSoft has to refocus. It can't be easy > for them.
As someone who used to work at terrasoft (in 2000) I can say that they've been doing HPC work for years now. They were most well known for yellowdog, but they have always had a focus on the high end. Check their old press releases to see various projects they've worked on.
-Jeff
A letter from Terra Soft's CEO, "One year later ..." Posted Sep 14, 2006 14:41 UTC (Thu) by hbkeultjes (guest, #40517) [Link] Indeed, the Genesi folks have hung in there and they deserve a tremendous amount of praise. However, for a rapidly changing PC hardware architecture, PowerPC is too compelling. Save for the geeks, the gamers and the server boxes, the Dell model, in which a company's strength is logistics and assembling custom boxes is all but dead, soon to be replaced by PowerPC based SoC (Systems on a Chip) modules the size of a cigarette pack that plug into a "FuturePC" port on the back of an LCD monitor.
When that technology takes over, fabs like IBM, Chartered, Samsung and, yes, AMD, will make most of that FuturePC module and those modules will account for about 80% of the desktop PC business. With the current IBM technology that all those fabs have licensed, those fabs can not only make each wafer a different FuturePC version, they can make each chip on that wafer different so that the truly limited amount of customization that occurs on 80% of the PC volume, is just as viable as it is now.
For those more knowledgeable than I am about fab costs, let them do the math but my gut guess is that, at the 45nm level and at the current 10 million plus annual volume, the SoC module that is the heart of the XBox 360 will cost no more than ten bucks to produce so both the economics and the logistics greatly favor the use of PowerPC technology for 80% of the desktop market. That's why I have predicted for quite some time that Microsoft will buy AMD and the AMD ATI merger are just a step in that direction.
You can read the original "Perfect Pair - PowerPC and Desktop Linux" article and updates via this link http://www.ncolug.org/ppc.htm
Henry Keultjes
A letter from Terra Soft's CEO, "One year later ..." Posted Sep 21, 2006 16:56 UTC (Thu) by leandro (subscriber, #1460) [Link] soon to be replaced by PowerPC based SoC (Systems on a Chip) modules the size of a cigarette pack that plug into a "FuturePC" port on the back of an LCD monitor That sounds nice indeed, but GNU/Linux is not quite there. We still lack some eßential proprietary applications on the GNU PowerPC, like a more mature, up-to-date Java, MS.Net and specially Flash. I would love to know of concrete plans towards that. I have predicted for quite some time that Microsoft will buy AMD That would leave a WinAMD vs Lintel war for the PC market. It sounds strange, but stranger things have happened.
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