Sun Microsystems Recognizes Open Source Innovation with Announcement of OpenSPARC Community Innovation Award Winners

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:JAVA) today announced the winners of the OpenSPARC Community Innovation Awards Contest designed to fuel innovation around chip technology. The contest was part of Sun's Open Source Community Innovation Awards Program, a multi-year program running across several open source communities with a $1 Million total prize.

“Sun developed the Open Source Community Innovation Awards Program to foster innovation on a global level and recognize the most interesting initiatives within open source communities worldwide,” said Shrenik Mehta, Senior Director of Frontend Technologies and OpenSPARC program for Sun Microsystems. “The winners ranged from professors and students in the academia to developers working in the industry, all of whom demonstrated extraordinary creativity and collaboration leading to some outstanding innovations that will have a very real impact on the OpenSPARC community.”

Martin Johansson and Jiri Gaisler from Gaisler Research secured award recognition for the creation of a new bus Interface as well as demonstrating an application running on FPGA making a major contribution to the OpenSPARC community.

"Martin and I are very happy to get such great recognition for this innovation around the OpenSPARC T1 processor,” said Jiri Gaisler, one of the winners of the Grand Prize award. “We believe that our efforts will make it easier for people to engage in development on OpenSPARC and allow them to pursue additional innovative projects and implementations.”

Andrey Brito, a PhD student at the Systems Engineering Group at the Dresden University of Technology in Germany was also recognized for the Best Adaptation of a Single-thread Application to a Multi-thread CMT Environment.

“The performance of single thread applications can be increased considerably by processing events in parallel,” said Brito. “In my submission, I used speculation to harness the power of multi-cores to parallelize stateful components, which provided a 400% increase in application performance. Hopefully my example will motivate other people to optimize their applications to take advantage of the significant increase in performance of multithreaded computing environments.”

The OpenSPARC Contest Award categories and winners include the following:

-- Grand Prize - Martin Johansson, Jiri Gaisler of Gaisler Research

-- Best University Level Computer Architecture and/or VLSI course - Mark McDermott, Professor at the University of Texas, Austin

-- Best New Bus Interface Creation as a contribution to the OpenSPARC community - Martin Johansson, Jiri Gaisler of Gaisler Research

-- Best Demo of an Application running on an FPGA - Martin Johansson, Jiri Gaisler of Gaisler Research

-- Best Adaptation of a Single-thread Application to a Multi-thread CMT Environment - Andrey Brito, PhD student at the Systems Engineering Group at the Dresden University of Technology in Germany.

-- Best submission that makes a substantial contribution to the OpenSPARC community and does not constitute any of the other mentioned categories - Kushal Datta, Graduate student at University of North Carolina

-- See a full list of winners, along with detailed biographies, abstracts and contributions, at http://www.opensparc.net/community-innovation-awards-contest.html.

To hear podcast interviews with award winners Martin Johansson, Jiri Gaisler, and Mark McDermott click here: http://www.sun.com/featured-articles

OpenSPARC Community

OpenSPARC is an open source community that fosters the creation of tools and derivative chip designs based on Sun's UltraSPARC T1 and T2 CMT processors. The community includes Linux distributions from both Gentoo and Ubuntu, as well as FreeBSD, which support UltraSPARC T1 CMT Microprocessors. In addition, Xilinx has introduced a feature-rich, high-performance programmable OpenSPARC evaluation platform. Since its introduction in 2006, there have been more than 9,000 OpenSPARC T1 and T2 hardware downloads and more than 6,500 OpenSPARC T1 and T2 software downloads.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sun Microsystems develops the technologies that power the global marketplace. Guided by a singular vision -- "The Network is The Computer"(TM) -- Sun drives network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com.

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