Slashdot Mirror
Fixstars Buys Terra Soft
sgt scrub writes "If you have put Yellow Dog Linux on a PS3 or a Pre X86 Apple, or have an interest in the Cell Broadband Engine, you will be pleased to know that Fixstars has purchased Terra Soft. '"A Cell/B.E. software developer and long-time user of Yellow Dog Linux, Fixstars has great faith in Yellow Dog Linux," said Satoshi Miki, CEO of Fixstars. "This business acquisition allows us to offer a reliable and stable Linux distribution with sense of ease for our customers. I have no doubt that in the expanding Cell/B.E. ecosystem we will offer the best Cell/B.E. solution of the High Performance Computing generation."' I can't think of any group of people better suited to expand the Cell horizon."
I think the real hindrance to desktop use of (anything like) the Cell/BE is the difficulty in programming for them properly. People seem to have a hard enough time wrapping their heads around threads.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Just expanding on this a bit... The problem as I saw it, when trying Yellowdog and others, is that they desired to support the PS3 and the old school macs with the same binary distro, so every thing's built targeting not just the generation before cell but 2 or 3 before it and optimized for the entirely wrong pipeline. Add to this the fact that ALL of the device's IO is arbitrated by a software layer in the hypervisor (including network IO), the 256mb of ram, and the blocked GPU and VRam (no CUDA), and the Cell itself being restricted to 6 cores (1 disabled for yield, 1 reserved for the hypervisor) this platform is essentially useless for anything but educational toy purposes as far as high performance computing is concerned. Granted, it's a GAME CONSOLE not a super computer, but Sony DID promise to 'fully' support linux and homebrew on these machines. I can understand them wishing to protect their interests, and don't blame them for the hypervisor setup, however being able to use the vram and gpu for CUDA tasks would have made this thing bearable for this use. And Yellowdog not aiming for the lowest-common-denominator would have made it fun and maybe even practical. I sure hope Fixstars fixes this.