Terra Soft and Total Impact offer integrated PowerPC clustersNew York 18 July 2001 Terra Soft and Total Impact will partner for the tight integration and sales of Total Impact's briQ with Terra Soft's Yellow Dog and Black Lab Linux operating systems. Terra Soft now offers the briQ as a stand-alone Yellow Dog Linux computational node or integrated into a 4 and 8 node cluster with Black Lab Linux installed and configured. Total Impact is bundling the full Yellow Dog Linux 2.0 package with each unit sale of the briQ, enhanced with the installation of Black Lab Linux upon request.
High-performance PowerPC-based systems offer greatly reduced power consumption
over Intel, Alpha, and SGI. A reduction in air-conditioning demand and
associated electric bills equates to a significant dollar savings for large HPC
centers as well as an increase in off-grid, back-up power time. Running nearly
silent, a cluster of 8 briQs produces less noise than a single x86 box and
consumes just 20 to 40 watts per node -- less than a typical household
lightbulb.
JPL Image Processing Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has ordered a 16 node
cluster from Terra Soft. Nevin Bryant, staff member of the Science Data
Processing Systems Section, JPL, states: "(The Black Lab Linux cluster) will
support a variety of image processing applications which often require a series
of sequential steps and asynchronous procedures. It will work well in a
distributed environment as each of the images is of a different size, as with a
panorama mozaic from a set of Mars Pathfinder images. Another example might be a
massively parallel SAR image processing system. Neither of these requires a high
volume of internode communication but instead relies upon the processing power
of the individual nodes." This Black Lab briQ cluster will be delivered in
August.
The briQ may be purchased with a Motorola G4 chip which includes the AltiVec
processing unit. AltiVec(TM) technology provides leading-edge, general-purpose
processing performance while concurrently addressing high-bandwidth data
processing and algorithmic-intensive computations in a single-chip solution.
32-bit code has been routinely demonstrated to enjoy a 120-300% increase in
performance over non-AltiVec systems. Terra Soft's next release of Black Lab
Linux will include C/C++ and Fortran pre-compilers to assist programmers in
AltiVec preparation of their code.
Ad Emmen |
 |