Sun Wins DOD Contract

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:JAVA - News) today announced that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded Sun $44.29 million funding for a five and a half-year research project focused on microchip interconnectivity via on-chip optical networks enabled by Silicon photonics and proximity communication. Part of DARPA's Ultraperformance Nanophotonic Intrachip Communication program, the project commences with an incremental delivery of $8.1 million to Sun Microsystems' Microelectronics and Laboratories divisions. For more information on research projects at Sun, visit http://www.research.sun.com.

Building on research done under DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems program, Sun's new project will accelerate the development of lower cost, high performance and high productivity systems. The project presents a unique opportunity to develop supercomputers through interconnecting an array of low-cost chips, with the potential to overcome the fundamental cost and performance limits of scaling up today's large computer systems. By providing unprecedented high bandwidth, low latency, and low power interconnections between the parallel computing chips in such an array, this research project will help enable a broad class of companies and organizations to 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, chief technology officer and executive vice president of research and development for Sun. “Congratulations to Sun Labs and Microelectronics teams for their constructive creativity and for driving innovation into the semiconductor marketplace."

Sun Microsystems Inc.