On November 11, 2008, Japanese company Fixstars announced that it had acquired essentially 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
Irvine, California. Fixstars Solutions retained Terra Soft's product line, staff and regional offices in
Loveland, Colorado. Terra Soft provided software and services for the
PowerPC/
Power ISA 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. Air Force,
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
PowerPC/
Power ISA, 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. == Hardware ==