SUN OPENS NEW PROCESSOR DESIGN COMPUTE RANCH.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) has opened the doors of a world-class facility to house its Sunnyvale, Calif., 2,800 processor-and-growing microprocessor design Compute Ranch. The new facility, and its sister sites in Austin, Texas and Chelmsford, Mass., is designed to speed development of new versions of the award-winning UltraSPARC processor by dedicating increasingly massive computing power to the task of designing and verifying complex, multi-Gigahertz, multi-100-million transistor processor designs. The ranches, which total 5,500 processors, serve Sun's 1,300-member processor design engineering team, and underscore Sun's commitment to keep the UltraSPARC processor ahead of competitors in the workstation/server technology space.

Ed Zander, Sun's president and chief operating officer said: "The UltraSPARC processor is at the heart of our strategy. We're absolutely focused on making the people, technology and brick-and-mortar investments necessary to keep the UltraSPARC architecture well ahead of the competition. The Ranch is also an outstanding example of a Sun-on-Sun solution that can be applied to a broad spectrum of customers engaged in compute intensive engineering and research work."

David Yen, vice president and general manager of Sun's Processor Products Group said: "In processor design, you either manage complexity or complexity manages you. The Sun processor design Compute Ranches accelerate time-to-market for UltraSPARC processors by acting as a kind of time machine -- shrinking design phases by applying quadrillions of well managed compute cycles to the effort every day. This buys a lot of time not only to stay ahead of our competition in the performance race, but to build in the scalability, reliability, availability, serviceability, data throughput, and critical-to-quality features that our corporate, government and research customer base can find in no other processor architecture."

The Compute Ranch's main role is to perform the myriad calculations required to design new processors. To give some idea of the number crunching required for this kind of work, designing the UltraSPARC III processor required more than 400 Billion simulated cycles. At tape out for the UltraSPARC III processor -- when designers send a chip "recipe" to the fab for production -- data for chip consisted of 90,000 data files, occupying 23 Gigabytes of disk space.

Other vital statistics of the Sun Ranches are just as impressive. In its current configuration, the 5,500 processor infrastructure can shrink design workload that could require up to of six years of single-processor computing time to the equivalent of a single day. The 5,500 processors are contained in over 700 separate multi-processor systems. The Ranches are also feature 30 high-availability file server clusters. The entire infrastructure encompasses 4.7 trillion bytes (terabytes) of random access memory and 250 Terabytes of data storage. Even with these massive resources, the Ranches run at 98 percent of their processing capacity on a 24-by-7-by-365 basis.

Sun Compute Ranches are classic all-UltraSPARC all-Solaris, all-Sun Storage technical computing environments. A specialized software architecture running on top of the Solaris operating environment manages engineers' requests for Ranch services. This job management software distributes jobs among thousands of processors and manages licenses for over 125 third-party EDA applications and 100 Sun-internally-developed CAD tools.

Engineers access Ranch resources either through Sun workstations, or, increasingly, via Sun Ray Solaris terminals. The Sun Ray systems are proving especially popular among Sun engineers who recognize that they gain more by accessing the power of the pooled resources of the Ranch rather than executing jobs on their desktop. Ranch management has found it simpler and less costly to administer and provision Sun Ray desktop resources than full-blown workstations.

The architecture of the Ranch, which emphasizes the power of pooled computing resources can also be applied to many other compute-intensive tasks, including mechanical engineering, architecture, biotechnology/genomics, civil engineering, control systems, aerospace, oil and gas exploration, defense, signal and image analysis, and film and video production.

The new Ranch building is just one of the ways that Sun is demonstrating its commitment to developing advanced versions of the UltraSPARC processor product. The company's 1,300-member-and-growing UltraSPARC design team is the second largest processor engineering organization on the planet. The Austin, Chelmsford and Sunnyvale Compute Ranches plus Sun's investment in the latest processor design tools and techniques makes this engineering force one of the best equipped in the industry. The company recently celebrated the 13th anniversary of its processor manufacturing technology relationship with Texas Instruments, Inc. Under this core-competence-driven business model, Sun focuses on what it does best -- processor design -- while leveraging the world-class manufacturing capabilities of a trusted partner.