Fixstars Solutions, Inc. is a software and services company specializing in

multi-core processor A multi-core processor is a microprocessor on a single integrated circuit with two or more separate processing units, called cores, each of which reads and executes program instructions. The instructions are ordinary CPU instructions (such ...

s, particularly in

Nvidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

's GPU and CUDA environment, IBM Power7, and

Cell Cell most often refers to: * Cell (biology), the functional basic unit of life Cell may also refer to: Locations * Monastic cell, a small room, hut, or cave in which a religious recluse lives, alternatively the small precursor of a monastery ...

. They also specialize in

solid-state drive A solid-state drive (SSD) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies to store data persistently, typically using flash memory, and functioning as secondary storage in the hierarchy of computer storage. It is a ...

s 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 Irvine () is a master-planned city in South Orange County, California, United States, in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The Irvine Company started developing the area in the 1960s and the city was formally incorporated on December 28, 197 ...

. Fixstars Solutions retained Terra Soft's product line, staff and regional offices in Loveland, Colorado. Terra Soft provided software and services for the PowerPC/ Power ISA and Linux OS platform. Former Terra Soft Solutions produced

Yellow Dog Linux Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) is a discontinued free and open-source operating system for high-performance computing on multi-core processor computer architectures, focusing on GPU systems and computers using the POWER7 processor. The original deve ...

(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 t ...

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

Boeing The Boeing Company () is an American multinational corporation that designs, manufactures, and sells airplanes, rotorcraft, rockets, satellites, telecommunications equipment, and missiles worldwide. The company also provides leasing and p ...

, Lockheed Martin, and SAIC; the

U.S. Air Force The United States Air Force (USAF) is the air service branch of the United States Armed Forces, and is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. Originally created on 1 August 1907, as a part of the United States Army Sign ...

Navy A navy, naval force, or maritime force is the branch of a nation's armed forces principally designated for naval and amphibious warfare; namely, lake-borne, riverine, littoral, or ocean-borne combat operations and related functions. It in ...

Army An army (from Old French ''armee'', itself derived from the Latin verb ''armāre'', meaning "to arm", and related to the Latin noun ''arma'', meaning "arms" or "weapons"), ground force or land force is a fighting force that fights primarily on ...

, and

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil List of government space agencies, space program ...

; and many of the top universities around the world including

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

, and Stanford University. As an Apple

value-added reseller A value-added reseller (VAR) is a company that adds features or services to an existing product, then resells it (usually to end-users) as an integrated product or complete "turn-key" solution. This practice occurs commonly in the electronics or IT ...

and IBM Business Partner, Terra Soft Solutions provided

turnkey A turnkey, a turnkey project, or a turnkey operation (also spelled turn-key) is a type of project that is constructed so that it can be sold to any buyer as a completed product. This is contrasted with build to order, where the constructor builds ...

and build-to-order desktop workstations, servers, and High Performance Computing clusters. Terra Soft made their Yellow Dog Linux distribution solely for PowerPC/ Power ISA, optimizing the distributions for AltiVec and the

. Terra Soft was the first to support a variety of

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancestor, ' ...

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 The PlayStation 3 (PS3) is a home video game console developed by Sony Computer Entertainment. The successor to the PlayStation 2, it is part of the PlayStation brand of consoles. It was first released on November 11, 2006, in Japan, November ...

products. In 2006, Terra Soft was contracted by

Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professiona ...

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 Advanced Video Coding (AVC), also referred to as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10, is a video compression standard based on block-oriented, motion-compensated coding. It is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, compression, and distr ...

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 Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and List of cities in Japan, largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, ...

, 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 * Two 1 Gigabit

Ethernet port Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 19 ...

s * One x16 PCI Express interface *

Serial port In computing, a serial port is a serial communication interface through which information transfers in or out sequentially one bit at a time. This is in contrast to a parallel port, which communicates multiple bits simultaneously in parallel. ...

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