[yellowdog-announce] Terra Soft Releases Y-HPC for YDL v4.0.1: Press Release 2005 03/16

[yellowdog-announce at lists.terrasoftsolutions.com]

TERRA SOFT RELEASES Y-HPC UPDATE FOR YDL v4.0.1

Loveland, Colorado -- 16 March 2005 -- Terra Soft Solutions(R), Inc., the 
leading developer of integrated PowerPC Linux solutions, is pleased to 
announce the release of Y-HPC for Yellow Dog Linux v4.0.1, featuring a 
rebuild against the 2.6.10 kernel.

Y-HPC is Terra Soft's 64-bit PowerPC Linux operating system and cluster 
construction/management suite. In use by the Department of Energy, Department 
of Defense, University labs, and corporations nation-wide, Y-HPC offers a 
full 64-bit code development foundation and an advanced, rapid cluster 
construction and management suite.

Kai Staats, co-founder and CEO of Terra Soft offers, "Y-HPC is being adopted 
at a remarkable pace. In the course of a recent road tour I worked with a 
number of cluster admins who had come to accept six weeks to three months or 
more as standard to bring a cluster from physical construction to a useful 
state. This is not acceptable. Our customers are building 30 node clusters in 
just a few hours. larger systems limited only by the speed at which the nodes 
can be netbooted."

At the heart of Y-HPC is a node image delivery system which enables rapid 
compute node construction using an intuitive, graphical interface. Multiple 
node images may be built and maintained on the cluster server, used to test 
new image deployments while archiving tested, stable systems. Clusters may be 
logically divided into sub-systems where Y-Imager offers a visual means of 
maintaining the unique node images.

Two improvements to the Y-Imager GUI in this Y-HPC release are the addition of 
a table view to that of the original birds-eye grid and an improved color 
selector used to tag and rapidly identify unique node images within a 
cluster.

"As the developer of Y-Imager, manager of our realworld G5 test cluster, and 
support engineer, it has been rewarding to improve the Y-HPC suite and know 
it will immediately improve our customers' experience. The better Y-Imager 
works, the less time I spend on the phone. It's self motivating," states AJ 
Hawks, lead Y-Imager developer at Terra Soft. 

Some applications and libraries included with Y-HPC:
     PowerPC port of System Imager, unique Y-Imager user interface
     64-bit gcc, toolchain, and the gdb (debugger)
     NFS, NIS
     PVFS2 (parallel virtual file system)
     Torque job scheduler
     MVAPICH, MPI-CH, LAM-MPI
     64-bit InfiniBand driver from SBS Technologies
     lapack, linpack, and NCBI-BLAST

Beta releases of Sun Grid Engine and ganglia are available from YDL.net Pro 
accounts.

Terra Soft's customers are using Y-HPC in a wide array of functions: to build 
and manage Linux clusters, to serve NFS for OSX boxes, to control Xserve 
RAIDs, to support flight simulators, and to maintain mission-critical, 
high-availability web and email servers with greater than 60,000 users on a 
single box. Y-HPC has operated on 3000 CPUs, improving performance over OSX 
by up to 15% while enabling rapid code migration from Linux clusters built 
upon non-PowerPC architectures.

Customers include Lawrence Livermore and Pacific Northwest National Labs; 
Universities of Arizona, John Hopkins, Tulane, and UCLA; Boeing, Array 
Systems Computing, Lockheed Martin, Presearch, Progeny Systems, Rockwell 
Collins. and the Navy. Commercial customers include Boeing, Motorola, SBS, 
and Simulation Technologies.

Staats continues, "This spring we will finalize our support for IBM JS20s with 
a specific node image. The POWER5 will soon follow. And then the delivery of 
market specific node images to support specific fields of research. Our 
roadmap for Y-HPC is clear and far reaching. With the support of industry 
associates Absoft, Verari, Platform, SBS, Momentum, and IBM, Y-HPC for 970 
and POWER systems is a strong contender in the HPC market."

     More information is available at:
     http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/products/y-hpc/

The new release of Y-HPC, a date-time stamped product, is immediately 
available from the YDL.net Pro accounts for existing customers. New purchases 
may be made on-line at http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/store/ or through 
Terra Soft's partners Amulet in Japan and IXSoft in Germany.


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, HA servers, and 
HPC clusters. Terra Soft's Y-HPC 64-bit OS and cluster construction suite is 
widely accepted as a preferred platform for Xserve clusters.

For more information, visit www.terrasoftsolutions.com

IBM and PowerPC are registered trademarks of International Business Machines 
Corporation. Xserve and OSX are registered trademarks of Apple Computer. All 
other trademarks or registered trademarks are property of their respective 
owners.