[yellowdog-announce] SBS, Terra Soft Offer 64-bit PowerPC Linux InfiniBand: Press Release 10 November 2004

[yellowdog-announce at lists.terrasoftsolutions.com]

SBS, TERRA SOFT OFFER 64-BIT POWERPC LINUX INFINIBAND

Pittsburgh, PA -- 10 November 2004 -- Terra Soft Solutions(R), Inc., the 
leading developer of integrated PowerPC Linux solutions is pleased to 
announce the world's first 64-bit PowerPC Linux InfiniBand driver from the 
showfloor of SC2004.

InfiniBand is a high speed interconnect fabric delivering throughput of up to 
1 gigabyte per second. SBS offers InfiniBand host channel adapter cards (PMC, 
PCI-X, and PCI Express) and switch solutions based upon Mellanox Technologies 
silicon products. These InfiniBand solutions deliver unmatched 
price/performance for tightly-coupled HPC clusters, inter-server 
communications, storage, video streaming, and other applications demanding a 
high throughput and low latency interconnect.

"SBS Technologies is pleased to partner with Terra Soft Solutions to provide 
the industry's only complete end-to-end InfiniBand solution for customers 
using 64-bit PowerPC platforms. The Yellow Dog Linux-based Y-HPC driver kit 
is designed for HPC application developers who require exceptional 
performance," said Bill Molyneux, General Manager of the SBS Technologies 
General Purpose I/O Group in Minnesota. "InfiniBand technology continues to 
gain rapid adoption in enterprise server applications, solving the inherent 
issues of scalability and performance."

Current SBS IB technologies provide eight times the performance of Gigabit 
Ethernet and more than three times the performance of other proprietary 
interconnects.

Kai Staats, co-founder and CEO of Terra Soft states, "InfiniBand by design is 
the optimal internode and storage communcation fabric. One system. One 
driver. Functionality in a variety of systems. Highly scalable too, IB offers 
a robust means of growing clusters from a few dozen to greater than 1000 
nodes with low latency and dedicated channel throughput ... In working with 
Mellanox and SBS to produce the 64-bit PowerPC Linux driver, we have found 
the SBS engineering and sales teams to be knowledgable, thorough, and 
dedicated to quality product and relationships. This partnership is 
cornerstone to our work in the HPC space."

SBS InfiniBand offers:
  - Dual 10Gb/s InfiniBand 4X Ports
  - IBTA v1.1 Compatible Design
  - Support for Millions of Queue Pairs
  - Large On-chip InfiniBand Port Buffers
  - Low Latency Transport
  - Memory Options of 128, 256MB, or more DDR Memory
  - InfiniBand Native Layer 4 Hardware Acceleration
  - Support for Eight Data VLs plus the VL15 Management Lane
  - Sophisticated Quality of Service (QoS) Features
  - Multicast, Atomic and Large Message Support
  - Hardware Support for UC, UD, RC and RAW Mechanisms

Terra Soft's integrated IBM 970 Apple G5 compute nodes with SBS InfiniBand and 
Y-HPC offer a highly competitive foundation for large scale clusters while 
maintaining nearly seamless code migration to and from Red Hat-based x86 and 
ia64 systems, reducing cost of adoption and maintenance. IBM 970-based 
solutions enable a strong price / performance / density / power-consumption 
ratio, increasingly important for large-scale HPC facilities.

 To learn more, visit:
 http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/products/sbs/

A 4-node, 8-CPU G5 Xserve cluster with SBS IB interconnect and Terra Soft's 
64-bit OS Y-HPC is demonstrated at the Argonne National Lab booth, SC2004 
convention through the close of show Thursday.


About SBS Technologies
SBS Technologies delivers a rich mix of standard and custom embedded computing 
solutions backed by our engineering expertise and dedicated OEM support. SBS 
customers benefit from our ability to leverage our technology experience 
across a variety of markets.

For more information, visit http://www.sbs.com/


About Terra Soft Solutions, Inc.
Terra Soft is a leading Integrated Solutions Provider with proven expertise in 
the PowerPC architecture and Linux OS platform. As an Apple Authorized 
Proprietary Solutions Provider and IBM Business Partner, Terra Soft provides 
turnkey and build-to-order portables, desktop workstations, application and 
network servers, and HPC clusters. Terra Soft offers both 32-bit and 64-bit 
PowerPC Linux distributions.

For more information, visit http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/