Sony’s Playstation gives Terra Soft OS major boost

LOVELAND – After a months-long delay and a year behind its major competitors, Sony is ready to launch its Playstation 3 gaming system in November and, in that debut, bring a huge boon to a Northern Colorado company.

In its mission to dominate the gaming wars, Sony has teamed up with Loveland-based Terra Soft Solutions Inc. to turn its game machine into a personal computer.

Terra Soft’s new Yellow Dog Linux version 5.0 will be the operating system that supports the PS3. With the new Sony system expected to meet or exceed the 10 million Playstation 2 units that shipped worldwide, the new YDL operating system could be a boon not just for the company but also for Linux.

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When installed by the user, YDL will turn the PS3 gaming unit into a fully functioning home computer. The default installation will include applications to provide a complete office environment, Web browser, e-mail client, instant messenger, graphics manipulation suite and personal assistants such as calendar, notes and other functions. Additional applications will be available for download and installation.

“This default set is designed to bring a level of familiarity and comfort, to provide the simplest Linux install possible where users need only provide a username, password, some information about their location and preferred monitor settings,´ said Terra Soft CEO Kai Staats.

Terra Soft worked with a team from desktop developer Enlightenment to get a rush on the latest available desktop – E17 – which features include moving scenes of clouds or a setting and rising sun in which the movements are so natural, users sometimes don’t notice until they come back to the computer after a while.

Yellow Dog Linux will not be pre-installed on the system. The PS3 will come with what Sony refers to as the “Game OS,” according to Staats, which will run as the foundation on which the games operate.

“Linux is a second operating system installed by the user, at this point in time,´ said Staats, who expects that YDL 5.0 will be the only operating system available for the PS3 upon its launch.

“Mac OS and Windows are not going to operate on the PS3,” he said. “Personally, I think (E17) makes Mac OS look like a joke.”

The OS will be available as a free download about a month after the PS3 launch. Terra Soft also recently decided to offer YDL in retail outlets where the PS3 is sold.

The company offered its products in retail outlets from 1999 to 2002 and has a number of retail relationships. However, many software companies have moved to selling direct.

“Retail is a break-even marketing opportunity, at best,” Staats explained. “The return to retail is a little bit scary.”

The company will begin securing retail commitments in the next few weeks.

In addition to the increased work of going retail again, Terra Soft will handle all of the support for the operating system. But the company isn’t daunted.

“Actually, the support is easy,” Staats said.

Terra Soft’s staff has already been modified to handle the work it is doing with Sony. However, pending contracts that should be closed by the first quarter of 2007 will drive the company to hire a couple more engineers and increase its sales staff.

In all, Staats estimates the company has about $4 million in outstanding quotes that he hopes to close by the end of the year.

Year of change

The past year has held a lot of changes for Terra Soft. The company, founded in 1999, had largely been dedicated to developing Linux software for PowerPC processors. For the better part of the last decade, Apple Computers Inc. used the Power architecture in its Macintosh line.

However, Apple announced in the summer of 2005 that the company would begin using Intel processors in its Macs, a decision that could have crippled Terra Soft. The company had to choose – continue to focus on the Power architecture or continue to work with Apple. Staats made the decision immediately to continue with Power because that was really the company’s core competency.

Terra Soft has been developing its Yellow Dog Linux operating system since 1999. Earlier this year, the company introduced two new products – Y-HPC and Y-Bio.

Y-Bio is a bioinformatics program designed to assist in gene sequence analysis. Y-HPC is largely used to smooth the operations of computing clusters, linked groups of computers that perform a common function.

Terra Soft’s evolution is also a boon for Linux. Linux was developed in the early 1990s using Unix. The operating system was created as and remains an open-source program, meaning that access and changes are available to everyone.

Linux has become the most successful open-source operating system, but is still largely misunderstood in a Windows-dominated market. Having a Linux operating system on the PS3 translates into the potential to expose millions of new users to Linux – and Yellow Dog.

Terra Soft might have a lot in the works now, but don’t expect any new products soon.

“Right now, we’re focused on taking what we have and expanding our customer base,” Staats said.

Leveraging relationship

Terra Soft is leveraging its relationship with Sony not only through the consumer market for the PS3, but also to develop and manage a supercomputer at its Loveland headquarters.

This summer, the company built a 3,000-square-foot addition to its facility to house the world’s first Cell-based supercomputing center. The supercomputer will accommodate two computing clusters using the IBM Cell Broadband Engine and Linux operating system. A computing cluster is a group of computers joined to perform certain high-performance applications.

The supercomputing facility will have the capacity to house 2,400 systems that take up one rackmount each. One rackmount is typically defined as 19 inches wide, 1.75 inches high and between 17.7 inches and 21.5 inches deep. The cluster is using some of the PS3 beta systems, which actually take up two rackmounts.

The supercomputing center will house two clusters. The first, a test cluster, will allow Terra Soft to conduct advanced software development, with a focus on its Y-HPC and Y-Bio products applied on the Cell Engine.

Terra Soft will also manage a larger production cluster for use by universities and Department of Energy laboratories with a focus on life sciences research. Lawrence Berkeley, Los Alamos and Oak Ridge national labs are already signed on to use the cluster.

John Shalf, a staff scientist at the Berkley lab, leads a group that conducts early evaluations on computing architecture to determine potential applications. Shalf’s group has been studying the Cell engine for about three years, but only on smaller computing systems. Terra Soft’s supercomputer will be the largest Cell system Shalf’s team will have had access to.

“It’s still being put together,” he said. “We have access to a smaller system they’ve put together.”

Shalf said he will look at several aspects of the Cell supercomputer. He will evaluate its performance using scientific algorithms to determine what applications will work well and how difficult it will be to program existing algorithms for the Cell system.

Terra Soft will not charge for use of the computing cluster. The company will be able to further develop its own software on the cluster, while allowing other users to run their own applications.

Much of Terra Soft’s work with the PS3 and the computing center will directly result in big profits for the company. More important, it will expose the company to a whole new customer base that is ripe for the picking.