HPCwire: Terra Soft Carries the Torch for Cell and Power Platforms

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September 07, 2007

Terra Soft Carries the Torch for Cell and Power Platforms

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Since launching Yellow Dog Linux for the PLAYSTATION3 (PS3) last year, Terra Soft has been busy expanding its presence in the Cell processor ecosystem. To get an update about what the company has been doing, we contacted Terra Soft's CEO Kai Staats via email in Nakuru, Kenya. Staats is there working with the Pistis Orphanage & Academy to complete some important projects for the children's home and school.

HPCwire: The last time we talked in October 2006, Terra Soft had just announced the first Cell-based clusters "E.coli" and "Amoeba." Can you catch us up on what's happened at the company since then? What's the status of the "E.coli" and "Amoeba" clusters?

Staats: The two clusters originally proposed by Terra Soft, a total of 480 nodes, were delayed due to a change of hardware, Sony preferring that we use production PS3 systems in place of the slated 2U rackmount beta units as they came back from game developers, world-wide.

This spring, the cluster was initiated by a starting block 16, in operation now, with an anticipated total of 128 in motion. This cluster is comprised of an Apple G5 head node with Gigabit Ethernet interconnect to 16 PS3s. All units are running YDL [Yellow Dog Linux] v5.x with TORQUE, Moab, and MPI in place for both parallel and distributed jobs.

This cluster, now and as it grows, is available for free to all Consortium Technical members to use as a test-bed for their own cluster code.

In other areas, Terra Soft has landed two substantial board support package contracts for new Cell based servers, details to be announced later this fall via official PR. In this respect, Terra Soft has gained a pole position as a leader in the provision of a Cell operating system.

HPCwire: What's going on with the HPC Consortium you launched back in January?

Staats: It is doing well. We spent nearly six months rebuilding the physical and logical infrastructure in preparation for growth, now unifying G-Forge (the open-source foundation for Source Forge) with LDAP and a member wiki for a single, per user account across the build-box, QS20 blades, and PS3 cluster. New systems may be rapidly deployed, seamlessly dropping into the existing system.

The goal of the Consortium has grown too, with a vision not just for the successful launch of the Cell processor via the original Hack-a-thon, but to carry Consortium members into years of forward thinking, open and private research on leading, high performance computing technologies.

Interest at Sony, IBM, and Mercury has helped shape the Consortium in its early stages, pressing for not-for-profit and eventually, 501c3 status in order to receive "donated" hardware into the 3,000 square-foot supercomputing room which has a capacity for 2,000 1U rackmount systems.

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