System News for Sun Users - The Blog

Sun Labs Open House last week focused on the many and varied projects the research teams at Sun are working on. One of these is the research platform Project Caroline. Richard Zippel described this team project, of which he is a part, as:

“…a really cool platform that allows you to programmatically control all of the infrastructure resources you might need in building a horizontally scaled system. You can allocate and configure databases, file systems, private networks (VLAN’s), load balancers, and a lot more, all dynamically, which makes it easy to flex the resources your application uses up and down as required.”

External partners can test out a Project Caroline grid and internal Sun users can try an internal grid that is available, Zippel notes.

Find out more about his project at its website and be sure to check out the article “A Platform… as a Service.”

Other research projects highlighted during the 2008 Sun Labs Open House include:

• Project Fortress - Led by the Sun Labs Programming Language Research Group, Fortress is a new programming language designed for high-performance computing (HPC) designed to deliver high programmer productivity. Project Fortress Version 1.0 was released March 31, 2008, as open source and is available at http://projectfortress.sun.com/Projects/Community/

• Project Darkstar - A Java technology-based software infrastructure to simplify the development and operation of massively scalable online games, virtual worlds, and social networking applications. Project Darkstar is open source and is available at http://www.projectdarkstar.com/

• Project Sun SPOT - An experimental platform for developing wireless sensor, robotics and swarm intelligence applications entirely in Java technology. The entire system, including hardware, operating system Java Virtual Machine, drivers and applications is available as Open Source on Java.net. Sun SPOT Developer Kit available at http://www.sunspotworld.com/

• Project Wonderland - A toolkit for building 3D virtual worlds, powered by Project Darkstar, is the basis for research into collaborative work and education environments. More information at https://lg3d-wonderland.dev.java.net/

Sun will be heading a research project on microchip interconnectivity funded by the Department of Defense to the tune of $44.29 million. The 5 1/2 year project will begin with $8.1 million provided to Sun Microsystems’ Microelectronics and Laboratories divisions which will be focusing on microchip interconnectivity via on-chip optical networks enabled by Silicon photonics and proximity communication.

The project will be working to develop supercomputers through interconnecting an array of low-cost chips. Sun’s program combines optical signaling with Proximity Communication, its key chip-to-chip I/O technology, to construct arrays of low-cost chips in a single virtual “macrochip.” Such an aggregation of inexpensive chips looks and performs like a single chip of enormous size, reports Sun. It also avoids soldered chip connections to enable lower total system cost. Long connections across the macrochip leverage the low latency, high bandwidth and low power of silicon optics. Sun and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will be researching technologies to further reduce the cost of these optical connections.

Dr. Jag Shah, program manager in DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office, commented, “DARPA’s UNIC (Ultraperformance Nanophotonic Intrachip Communications) program will demonstrate high performance photonic technology for high bandwidth, on-chip, photonic communications networks for advanced (≥ 10 trillion operations/second) microprocessors. By restoring the balance between computation and communications, the program will significantly enhance DoD’s capabilities for applications such as Image Processing, Autonomous Operations, Synthetic Aperture Radar, as well as supercomputing,”

By providing unprecedented high bandwidth, low latency and low power interconnections between the parallel computing chips in such an array, this research project could help other companies and organizations utilize applications with high compute and communication requirements, such as energy exploration, biotechnology and weather modeling.

“Optical communications could be a truly game-changing technology - an elegant way to continue impressive performance gains while completely changing the economics of large-scale silicon production,” said Greg Papadopoulos, CTO and executive vice president of research and development for Sun.