Terra Soft Solutions

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Terra Soft Solutions, Inc.

Type	Private
Founded	1999
Headquarters	Loveland, Colorado
Key people	Kai Staats, CEO
Industry	Operating systems, Services, Software
Products	Yellow Dog Linux
Website	www.terrasoftsolutions.com

Terra Soft Solutions is the Loveland, Colorado–based producer of Yellow Dog Linux, cluster construction tools, and bioinformatics software. The company’s clients include NASA, Boeing, California Institute of Technology, and Stanford University. Terra Soft provides software and services for the Power Architecture and Linux OS platform. As a Mercury, Apple, and Genesi value-added reseller, and IBM Business Partner, Terra Soft provides turnkey and build-to-order desktop workstations, servers, and High Performance Computing clusters. Terra Soft's Y-HPC 64-bit OS and cluster construction suite is widely accepted as a preferred platform for Xserve clusters. Terra Soft has made their Yellow Dog Linux distribution solely for Power Architecture, optimizing the distributions for technologies like for AltiVec, Cell and Hypervisor. Although its linux distributions are for Power Architecture, their Y-HPC(High Performance Computing) software and open source Y-Bio life science package are cross-architecture. They were the first to support a variety of Apple computers, first to offer PowerPC Linux suite for parallel computing "Black Lab", first commercial Linux OS for Apple G4 and the only company allowed to sell Apple computers bundled with an operating system other than Apple's own.^[1] When Apple abandoned PowerPC CPUs in favor of Intel Dual-Core chips, Terra Soft was able to concentrate on high-performance computing, while maintaining "hacker" credibility with Playstation 3 products. Terra Soft's recent efforts include the launch of Y-Bio, a cross-architecture life sciences package; and movement on the world's first commercial, Linux Board Support Package for the Cell processor, in collaboration with Mercury Computer. IBM, Mercury, and Sony, Cell-based systems In 2006, Terra Soft began work on the world’s first Cell-based supercomputer, in collaboration with the Lawrence Berkeley, Los Alamos, and Oak Ridge National Laboratories. The system is partly based on Sony PlayStation 3s.^[2] Yellow Dog Linux is the first Linux distribution to be certified for Cell and the PlayStation 3.^[3]

Products

Yellow Dog Linux – A Linux distribution optimized for Power Architecture hardware, like Apple's Power Mac, IBM's System p and Mercury's Cell based offerings and Sony's Play Station 3.
Playstation® 3s with Yellow Dog Linux pre-installed.
6-node and 32-node Playstation® 3 clusters, with seamless code migration to a Mercury Cell product upgrade path
Mercury 56 core BladeCenter JS21 Bioinformatics Cluster
Y-Bio – A Power Architecture optimized bio informatics suite, tailor made for DNA sequencing.
Y-HPC – A construction and management suite for Linux clusters.
OEM partner for IBM's System p and Mercury's Cell based hardware.