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Terra Soft Installs Biophysics Cluster at University of Colorado Boulder, Colorado -- 19 November 2002 -- Terra Soft Solutions, Inc., the leading developer of integrated PowerPC Linux solutions, is proud to announce the installation of a 30-node Xserve cluster running Yellow Dog Linux and Black Lab at the University of Colorado. The cluster, underwritten by a grant from the National Science Foundation for Professor Jeffrey Fox, Mathematics, and Professor Robert C. Eaton as co-principal investigator, is housed in the Departments of Biology (EPO) & Mathematics, and will assist researchers who are interested in understanding the biophysics of computation in neural dendrites. Fox has developed code for the cluster which enables new and more detailed models of neuron functions at the molecular dynamics level. "From my point of view, there is going to be explosive growth in demand for HPC in the biological sciences. The very nature of the people using this technology requires as little assembly of the hardware and software as possible, otherwise small labs will not be able to afford the time and expense of using cluster computing. While cluster computing is not a yet turn key affair ... the closer it gets to workstation status the more it will be incorporated into small labs," states Professor Fox. As an Apple Authorized OEM VAR, Terra Soft is uniquely positioned to provide single source HPC solutions to this growing market. Terra Soft's Black Lab cluster build-management suite offers single-click installation, simple configuration, automated updates through apt-get, and control from either an X windows graphical user interface or command line. Fox continues, "None of the people working on the project are experts in parallel computation, computer science, or applied mathematics. Our focus is on the biology and biophysics, so we went with Yellow Dog/Blacklab [in order to] minimize the amount of time and effort needed to set up a cluster for scientific computing." The Apple Xserve offers a price/performance competitive solution, flexible as a headless HPC node with as many as four or no local drives at all. Black Lab eliminates the need for keyboard and monitor switches, provides automated server to node process migration, and is immediately scalable to several hundred nodes. Yellow Dog Linux provides a professional open-source distribution substantiated by a large, growing userbase dedicated to PowerPC. Fox concludes, "We were very aggressive in our plans for the model in terms of computation, yet we had a very modest budget for hardware. The G4 was chosen [for its] price/performance ratio. The Xserve with gigabit ethernet is ideal for the current message passing requirements." Two months prior, Terra Soft assisted Fox with code development by assembling a 4-node Black Lab-YDL cluster using existing University Apple PowerMac G4s. About Terra Soft Solutions, Inc. Terra Soft is a leading developer of integrated solutions for PowerPC. Yellow Dog Linux, the flagship product, has boosted viability of Linux on PowerPC microprocessors with support for Apple Xserve, the briQ, and other PowerPC-based desktop, embedded, and HPC computers. Black Lab is an HPC cluster node build and management suite. For more information, visit www.terrasoftsolutions.com
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