“This concept of seamless code migration offers a homogeneous OS for heterogeneous hardware. It is imperative in an anti-Microsoft, ‘We don’t want to be nailed down to one thing anymore’ world. We want a choice,” Terra Soft CEO Kai Staats told MacNewsWorld in an exclusive interview.
Terra Soft CEO Kai Staats on Linux and the Mac
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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insitefull….I wonder if yellowdog and genesi will ever partner….i would liek to see yellowdog officialy suport the pegasos platform…as genesi is also partners with IBM, and it is a great and reletivly cheap PPC platform.
wow less of that….less of that to the extent of none…
It’s good to see Terrasoft settling into their high performance computing niche. Reminds me of SGI.
Also cool to hear about YDL 4.0 on the way. If it supports dual monitors right OOTB I may have to drag OS X kicking and screaming off of this PowerBook.
“insitefull….I wonder if yellowdog and genesi will ever partner….i would liek to see yellowdog officialy suport the pegasos platform…as genesi is also partners with IBM, and it is a great and reletivly cheap PPC platform.”
I fail to see how a $775 for just the motherboard and 1ghz processor is reletivily cheap. Hell, even Apple hardware is cheaper after you add a decent HDD, video card, case, etc…
They say applications run faster on YDL than Mac OS X?
I have to disagree. It depends if you are using Apple applications or non-apple applications. I’ve noticed alot of apple apps are resource intensive personally. It’s not necessarily mac os X’s fault. (IMHO)
I have been jumping up and down with excitement for the yellowdog 4.0 release. Terrasoft has not published any specifics about it yet. I would settle down a bit if they released specs, etc., including information about hardware integration. If I had a bigger hard drive in my iBook I might consider running YDL with maconlinux http://www.maconlinux.org/ OS X and Linux complement each other very well, thank you, as do Windows and Linux (with wine.) Oh well, I know that this rant has no point, just excited, that’s all.
Piece.
…”a lot of apple apps are resource intensive personally”
Something has to sell new hardware.
(Not a troll, or a conspiracy theory, or even necessarily representative of what I believe, just what popped into mind.)
“They say applications run faster on YDL than Mac OS X?
I have to disagree. It depends if you are using Apple applications or non-apple applications. I’ve noticed alot of apple apps are resource intensive personally. It’s not necessarily mac os X’s fault. (IMHO)”
It really depends on a lot of things. There are bad apps and good apps. Most of the resource intensive apps in OS X are medai apps like Garage Band. Safari for example isn’t intensive at all. It also depends on how well they are coded. YDL apps are mostly the same stuff on other Linux distros and not media based, so most of them are very lightweight. It’s really more about the individual app than the OS.
“I fail to see how a $775 for just the motherboard and 1ghz processor is reletivily cheap.”
Maybe supply and demand has driven the price up. All the Pegasos boards now being produced are being sold to corporate customers. Seems to me the enduser prices were quite a bit lower several months ago.
— gary_c
I’ve seen several benchmarks that show Linux being faster then Mac OS X by somtimes a fair margin, but for a HPC I don’t see how it matters, with a single app going fullblast on the CPUs then kernel difference hardly matter. However, Linux is more scalable…
Can OSX scale beyond two processors the way Linux can?
“Can OSX scale beyond two processors the way Linux can?”
They have OS X clusters. The army is building one now called the Mach 5 (I know I know, speed racer) that I think has 1,566 XServes (dual G5s) which is expected to come out at 25 Teraflops for $5.8 million.
— “Can OSX scale beyond two processors the way Linux can?”
Since PantherPPC didn’t exactly answer the question:
Yes, it scales to at LEAST 4 CPUs for sure, and probably more, though I do not know if that can be confirmed by Apple. I doubt Apple would ever release a system with more then four though, and even that is unlikly.
Indeed. Apple seems to be banking on clustering as a way to achieve HPC without having to research and develop high-end hardware that would only sell to a very small niche.
Why spend millions building a quad box when you can put the R&D into improving the dual Xserve and PowerMacs that will sell to smaller clients as well?
Supposively AIX is based on Mach, and scales to at least 32 CPUs if that helps any.
We are certainly *open* to YDL and have it featured on the site:
http://www.pegasosppc.com/odw.php
It fits in with the strategy outlined here:
http://www.genesi.lu/olp.php
We have posted some of the Apple issues here:
http://www.ppczone.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=14
Until we sold out all the stock/production the Pegasos II G3 (750CXe) was sold for 299 Euros through our online store. With the 7447A and the 750GX coming soon we think we will offer an attractive alternative.
The only issue here is that supercomputer apps are 64 bit. That is why they are not Pentiums. Also, it is IBM’s intention to dominate this sector with the Blue Gene G5 based blades. By this fall, the IBM blade based systems should occupy many of the top positions.
http://www.research.ibm.com/bluegene/index.html
A low energy and low footprint G4 based blade server would work extraordinarily well for most multi-processor aware 32 bit applications. Things like workgroup services, mail and web serving, multimedia management, many mid level business apps. We think the price point for a PegasosPPC could be stunning.
PegasosPPC is 90% a terrific story and 10% not G5, not 64 bit, not Oracle certified (yet), not available in polka dots. There are many customers where the 90% will provide 100% of their solution. The challenge is targeting the customers where the PegasosPPC 90% will deliver 100% of the customers required solution.
R&B 🙂
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