[yellowdog-announce] A letter from Terra Soft's CEO, "One year later ..."

[Announce List for all Terra Soft products (moderated)]

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/bladecenter.shtml)

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