SUN ANNOUNCES SUN GRID ENGINE 5.2 SOFTWARE FOR THE LINUX PLATFORM.

Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) further extends its resources to technical computing customers with the announcement of Sun Grid Engine 5.2 software for the Linux platform. The distributed resource management software is a free download via Sun's website at http://www.sun.com/gridware.

Building on the success of Sun Grid Engine software for the Solaris Operating Environment -- which has been downloaded by over 1000 organizations in 70 countries since its launch last year -- Sun's Grid Engine software now addresses the majority of the UNIX marketplace.

"Linux and other open source software has been an accepted part of technical and high performance computing for quite some time," said Dan Kusnetzky, IDC's Vice President for System Software Research. "Sun Grid Engine software could certainly add value when implementing heterogeneous distributed computing environments and is a welcome addition."

Distributed resource management (DRM) software such as the Sun Grid Engine product is designed to harness idle compute resources, match them to individual job requirements and deliver network-wide compute power to the desktop. Through this horizontal scaling, Sun Grid Engine software manages an organization's compute resources, allowing engineers to move beyond the desktop and leverage all the resources available on the net, thus reducing cycle times, speeding time to market and fundamentally changing the economics of technical computing.

"As design complexity and data set sizes grow exponentially, the need for computing resources also increases dramatically," said Mark Canepa, Sun's Vice President of Internet, Desktop and Server Group. "By distributing Sun Grid Engine for Solaris and Linux platforms free of charge, Sun is changing the economics of technical computing, eliminating all entry-level implementation costs and improving return on total technical computing investments in the wider UNIX marketplace."

Sun foresees "technical compute farms" -- the architecture created using Sun Grid Engine software -- as the platform of choice for high-performance computing. Sun Grid Engine software is designed to provide the massive scalability and agility needed to help companies keep pace with and capitalize on the Net Effect -- the macro-economic trend that is driving the exponential growth and increasing complexity the industry is experiencing as data, users, devices, services and availability requirements continue to multiply.

DRM software helps solve the problem of how to apply maximum resources to a single compute-intensive problem, and achieving massive scalability within the technical marketplace. An optimized technical compute farm using Sun Grid Engine software can push the utilization of an organization's computing resources from a typical 20 percent to as high as 90 percent.

Following through on its commitment to make Sun Grid Engine software a ubiquitous industry model, Sun Microsystems, plans to distribute the source code of its software under an industry-accepted open source license, through an alliance with CollabNet. This joint effort, expected to roll out during the next six months, should facilitate increased adoption of the distributed technical compute farm model.