Fixstars Solutions, Inc. is a software and services company specializing in multi-core processors, particularly in Nvidia's GPU and CUDA environment, IBM Power7, and Cell. They also specialize in solid-state drives and currently manufacture the world's largest SATA drives. During the early part of 2010, Fixstars developed a strong relationship with Nvidia and focused its linux distribution for GPU computing. Yellow Dog Enterprise Linux for CUDA is the first enterprise Linux OS optimized for GPU computing. It offers end users, developers and integrators a faster, more reliable, and less complex GPU computing experience.

Terra Soft acquisition

On November 11, 2008, Japanese company Fixstars announced that it had acquired essentially all of Terra Soft's assets. Terra Soft's former founder and CEO

Kai Staats Kai Kruse Staats is a filmmaker, science researcher, writer, and entrepreneur. At the Arizona State University School of Earth & Space Exploration, Staats contributed to the design of off-world human habitats as project lead for an Interplanetary ...

was appointed as COO of Fixstars's new American subsidiary, Fixstars Solutions, which is based in Irvine, California. Fixstars Solutions retained Terra Soft's product line, staff and regional offices in

Loveland, Colorado The City of Loveland is the home rule municipality that is the second most populous municipality in Larimer County, Colorado, United States. Loveland is situated north of the Colorado State Capitol in Denver and is the 14th most populous city ...

. Terra Soft provided software and services for the

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

Power ISA Power ISA is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) currently developed by the OpenPOWER Foundation, led by IBM. It was originally developed by IBM and the now-defunct Power.org industry group. Power IS ...

and Linux OS platform. Former Terra Soft Solutions produced Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) and Yellow Dog Enterprise Linux which included

cluster may refer to: Science and technology Astronomy * Cluster (spacecraft), constellation of four European Space Agency spacecraft * Asteroid cluster, a small asteroid family * Cluster II (spacecraft), a European Space Agency mission to study th ...

construction tools. Customers included Argonne, Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, and Los Alamos National Labs, several Department of Defense contractors including Boeing,

Lockheed Martin The Lockheed Martin Corporation is an American aerospace, arms, defense, information security, and technology corporation with worldwide interests. It was formed by the merger of Lockheed Corporation with Martin Marietta in March 1995. It ...

, and SAIC; the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Army, and NASA; and many of the top universities around the world including California Institute of Technology, MIT, and

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

. As an Apple value-added reseller and IBM Business Partner, Terra Soft Solutions provided turnkey and build-to-order desktop workstations, servers, and High Performance Computing clusters. Terra Soft made their Yellow Dog Linux distribution solely for

, optimizing the distributions for AltiVec and the Cell. Terra Soft was the first to support a variety of Apple computers with Linux pre-installed (under a unique license with Apple). When Apple abandoned PowerPC CPUs in favor of the Intel Core chips, Terra Soft was able to concentrate on high-performance computing and the Cell Broadband Engine, working closely with IBM and Sony for the PlayStation 3 products. In 2006, Terra Soft was contracted by Sony to provide a Linux operating system for the PlayStation 3, used by several University researchers as an inexpensive, powerful cluster compute node. In 2009 Fixstars released ''CodecSys CE-10 H.264'', an H.264 software encoder running on Playstations 3 from a USB key or live CD of Yellow Dog Linux, to provide faster than real-time H.264 video encoding using the PS3 Cell microprocessor. Today, Fixstars of Tokyo, Japan carries forward the Yellow Dog Linux and Yellow Dog Enterprise Linux product line with primary focus on heterogeneous, multi-core CPUs such as the Cell Broadband Engine and Nvidia GPU.

Hardware

YDL PowerStation

Terra Soft launched the YDL PowerStation also known as the Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) PowerStation on June 10, 2008 with a base price of $1,895. The YDL PowerStation offers: * Four IBM 970MP cores clocked at 2.5GHz * 8 DDR2 (PC2-5300P) slots for up to 32GB memory * Can unofficially be expanded to 64GB of memory with 8GB DIMMs. * Extended ATX motherboard * Single IDE controller * IDE DVD/CD-RW drive * 4 SAS hot-swap drive bays * Two x8 PCIe slots, One x16 PCIe slot, One PCI-X slot * ATI X1650 Pro with 2 DVI ports and 512MB of video memory * 2 Broadcom HT2000/BCM5780 Gigabit Ethernet ports * 4 USB v2.0 ports * 2 RS-232 serial ports * YDL PowerStation comes pre-installed with Yellow Dog Linux v6.0 * No audio adapter is included

Fixstars GigaAccel 180 (IBM PXCAB)

Fixstars GigaAccel 180 (IBM PXCAB) is an accelerator board based on IBM's PowerXCell 8i processor. * 4GB of

DDR2 SDRAM Double Data Rate 2 Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory (DDR2 SDRAM) is a double data rate (DDR) synchronous dynamic random-access memory (SDRAM) interface. It superseded the original DDR SDRAM specification, and was itself superseded by DDR3 ...

* Two 1 Gigabit Ethernet ports * One x16

PCI Express PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common ...

interface * Serial port

References

External links

Corporate website

Terra Soft Launches Quad-Core 'YDL PowerStation'

How do I download and install YDL®?
* tp://ftp.kddlabs.co.jp/Linux/packages/yellowdog/ Yellow Dog Linux FTP Mirror by KDD Labs in Japan{Dead link, date=November 2022 , bot=InternetArchiveBot , fix-attempted=yes Companies based in Colorado Computer companies of the United States Free software companies Linux companies Cell BE architecture Software companies based in California Software companies of the United States