| Type | Private, subsidiary of Fixstars Corporation |
|---|---|
| Industry | Operating systems, Services, Software |
| Founded | 1999, 2008 |
| Headquarters | Oakland, California |
| Products | Yellow Dog Linux, Accelcoder, GigaAccel 180 |
| Website | www.fixstars.com/en/ |
Fixstars Solutions, Inc is a software and services company specializing in Multi-core processor, particularly in the Nvidia's GPU and CUDA environment, IBM Power7 and Cell.
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.
On November 11, 2008, Japanese company Fixstars announced that it had acquired substantially all of Terra Soft's assets. Terra Soft's former founder and CEO Kai Staats was appointed as COO of Fixstars's new American subsidiary, Fixstars Solutions, which is based in San Jose, California, while retaining Terra Soft's product line, staff and regional offices in Loveland, Colorado.[1]
Terra Soft provided software and services for the Power Architecture and Linux OS platform. Former Terra Soft Solutions produced Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) and Yellow Dog Enterprise Linux which included cluster construction tools. Customers included Argonne, Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, and Los Alamos National Labs, several Department of Defense contractors including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and SAIC; the U.S. Airforce, Navy, Army, and NASA; and many of the top universities around the world including California Institute of Technology, MIT, and Stanford University.
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 Power Architecture, 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.
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.