Subject: [yellowdog-announce] Terra Soft Solutions & Total Impact Offer Integrated Solutions: Press Release 18 July 2001
From: Kai Staats (kstaats@terrasoftsolutions.com)
Date: Wed Jul 18 2001 - 07:50:01 MDT
TERRA SOFT SOLUTIONS & TOTAL IMPACT OFFER INTEGRATED SOLUTIONS
Macworld, NY -- 18 July 2001 -- Terra Soft Solutions, Inc., leading developer of PowerPC Linux technologies, and Total Impact, manufacturer of high-performance, high density G3/G4 computers today announced a partnership for the tight integration and sales of Total Impact's briQ with Terra Soft's Yellow Dog and Black Lab Linux operating systems.
Terra Soft now offers the briQ as a stand-alone Yellow Dog Linux computational node or integrated into a 4 and 8 node cluster with Black Lab Linux installed and configured. Total Impact is bundling the full Yellow Dog Linux 2.0 package with each unit sale of the briQ, enhanced with the installation of Black Lab Linux upon request.
"This is a profound business move for Terra Soft, a bold step into the high performance computing market. To date, we have been limited in our ability to fully support Apple and IBM hardware as all new features must be reverse engineered by our staff or members of the Linux community. An ongoing, time consuming, and expensive process. Our partnership with Total Impact results in an immediate, tightly integrated, fully supported solution. As the briQ is designed from the ground-up to run PowerPC Linux, our staff is allowed to focus more upon advancing our distributions ," stated Kai Staats, CEO Terra Soft Solutions, Inc.
High performance PowerPC-based systems offer greatly reduced power consumption over Intel, Alpha, and SGI. A reduction in air conditioning demand and associated electric bills equates to a significant dollar savings for large HPC centers as well as an increase in off-grid, back-up power time. Running nearly silent, a cluster of 8 briQs produces less noise than a single x86 box and consumes just 20 to 40 watts per node --less than a typical household lightbulb.
"Terra Soft offers proven expertise in software development. As our customers ask for Yellow Dog and Black Lab by name, this relationship supports our engineers' efforts and is what our customers have requested. In addition, we are eager to work with Terra Soft to move the briQs into the DoE and DoD labs. Terra Soft has a strong foundation in these arenas, offering immediate sales opportunities," states Glenn Churchman, CEO Total Impact.
JPL Image Processing Laboratory in Pasadena, California has ordered a 16 node cluster from Terra Soft. Nevin Bryant, staff member of the Science Data Processing Systems Section, JPL states, " [The Black Lab Linux cluster] will support a variety of image processing applications which often require a series of sequential steps and asynchronous procedures. It will work well in a distributed environment as each of the images is of a different size, as with a panorama mozaic from a set of Mars Pathfinder images. Another example might be a massively parallel SAR image processing system. Neither of these requires a high volume of internode communication but instead relies upon the processing power of the individual nodes." This Black Lab briQ cluster will be delivered in August.
The briQ may be purchased with a Motorola G4 chip which includes the AltiVec processing unit. AltiVec(TM) technology provides leading-edge, general-purpose processing performance while concurrently addressing high-bandwidth data processing and algorithmic-intensive computations in a single-chip solution. 32-bit code has been routinely demonstrated to enjoy a 120-300% increase in performance over non-AltiVec systems. Terra Soft's next release of Black Lab Linux will include C/C++ and Fortran pre-compilers to assist programmers in AltiVec preparation of their code.
The perfect high performance cluster node, a Black Lab briQ offers a low profile, rack-mountable, low power consumption, fast G4 solution. Affordable too, starting at just $1,699 for a single briQ. Single YDL briQs and fully configured BLL clusters are available from the Terra Soft Solutions' online Store : http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/store/
About Total Impact, Inc.
Total Impact designs, manufactures and markets innovative computer solutions for use in commercial applications and high performance systems. Utilizing PowerPC microprocessors and the Linux Operating System, Total Impact products are low-cost, small, quiet and the most energy efficient available in today's marketplace. As a leader in small footprint computing, Total Impact offers scalable and modular systems that fulfill the infrastructure and computing requirements of the Internet, corporate networks, industry, science, research and education.
For more information, visit http://www.totalimpact.com
About Terra Soft Solutions, Inc.
Terra Soft Solutions, Inc. is a leading developer of innovative technologies and provider of integrated HPC solutions for PowerPC Linux. Yellow Dog Linux, the flagship product, has boosted viability of Linux on PowerPC microprocessors. Black Lab Linux provides an advanced Linux environment for embedded and high performance, parallel computing systems.
For more information, visit http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Wed Jul 18 2001 - 11:17:55 MDT