NEWS BRIEFS LIVEwire

Dallas, Texas — As an established leader in High Performance Computing (HPC) and network technology, Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) is helping HPC customers capitalize on the Net Effect — the trend driving the exponential growth and increasing opportunities of the Internet as users, devices, services, data and demand for high availability continue to multiply. At the Supercomputing 2000 show in Dallas, TX, Sun is equipping customers new and old to utilize the power of Web-centric computing and provide massively-scalable systems that span the network.

At SC2000, Sun will be demonstrating the products, services and technologies that comprise a virtual supercomputing farm, allowing customers to harness unused resources (CPUs, memory and storage) across the network to handle the most data-intensive applications.

“It’s clear that the future of supercomputing is network-centric, and lies in both the shared power of smaller, parallel web-serving systems and large, cooperating clusters of SMP servers,” said Steve Campbell, Director of Marketing, Enterprise Systems. “Rather than focusing solely on traditional islands of computing power in a single location, Sun is applying the principles of Net Effect to bring disparate commercial and scientific communities the hardware they need to share data and resources across the globe.”

In the last year, Sun has established itself as the second-leading HPC provider, growing its market share by 20 times since it entered the supercomputing market in 1996 (according to IDC’s mid-year report on the High Performance Technical Computing market, published August 30). In the “World’s Top 500 Supercomputers” list announced on Friday, November 3, Sun captured the second-highest number of systems with 92 entries, representing more than 18 percent of the total list.

Recent announcements illustrate Sun’s continued commitment to the HPC
market, and its expanded efforts to tackle new generations of commercial applications such as decision support, data mining and bioinformatics.

Sun Life Sciences Programs

In September, Sun announced the Sun Discovery Bioinformatics Program, to enable biotechnology leaders to develop highly synergistic and interoperable solutions needed to power the discovery pipeline. In addition to aligning themselves with Sun technologies, program members will also receive technical support in optimizing and benchmarking, as well as developing and deploying solutions across networked computing environments. Sun also announced the Sun Informatics Advisory Council, a consultative group whose industry-leading commercial and academic members will assist in mapping out Sun’s future hardware, software and service offerings for the life science industries.

College of William and Mary

Sun and the College of William and Mary announced on November 1 the installation of one of the largest academic computing clusters worldwide. The “SciClone” HPC cluster is actually a grid of four sub-clusters that consists of 160 processors and offers a theoretical peak performance of 115 gigaflops (the equivalent of 115 billion mathematical operations per second). The grid-like environment will allow faculty and students to research the issues facing users of larger distributed systems utilizing the Internet.

Sun-Sponsored Activities at SC2000: Sun’s booth at SC2000 is illustrating these achievements and more with a variety of demos and presentations, including the following:

— Gil Weigand Keynote Presentation — Gil Weigand, Vice President of Technology Architecture for America Online, will be the featured speaker at the Sun booth on Tuesday, November 7, at 11 a.m. Formerly of the Department of Energy’s ASCI Program, Weigand’s presentation will discuss horizontal scalability, vertical scalability and the interplay between the two.

— High Performance Storage System (HPSS) 4.2 — Now available for the Solaris(TM) operating environment, IBM’s HPSS 4.2 is open system software designed to manage petabytes of data and to move large data objects between supercomputers, workstation clusters, and storage libraries at speeds several times faster than today’s software systems. HPSS can manage parallel data transfers from multiple network-connected disk arrays at rates greater than 1 Gbyte per second, making it possible to access high definition digitized video in real time. This demo will feature HPSS improvements for HPSS 4.2, including the Sun port and the efficiency of remote movers. Visitors will be able to request data from local and remote sources, with data rates commensurate with the bandwidth of interfaces to the local and remote movers.

— PerfAcct 3.1 — Resource Management Software Designed for the distributed network environment, Instrumental’s new PerfAcct 3.1 simplifies enterprise accounting by collecting data from multiple systems and delivering it to a central point. PerfAcct 3.1 will provide customers a higher level of resource management capability than ever before. The software’s features will be showcased in a live display as it manages the processing activity for all demos at the Sun booth.

— ESI — “E-Crash” Simulations ESI Group is a pioneer and leader in the field of virtual prototype testing software, and ESI’s flagship product PAM-CRASH is one of the most popular crash test simulation software packages. PAM-CRASH is specifically designed to simulate mechanical structural testing and meet increasingly-stringent regulatory crash tests. Sun and ESI are now moving this software into the new paradigm of portal supercomputing, and have built a prototype portal to provide Web access to start, stop and monitor a PAM-CRASH simulation.

— Brigham and Women’s Hospital — Image-Guided Surgery Visitors will be able to view first-hand how Sun’s high-performance workstations and Sun Enterprise(TM) servers can help surgeons remove previously inoperable brain tumors.

— Grid Engine — Technical Compute Farm With Sun’s acquisition of Gridware, Inc. in July 2000, and its industry-proven distributed resource management (DRM) tools Codine and the Global Resource Director (GRD), Sun is now offering its own suite of DRM software tools. Grid Engine workload management software will be showcased at the Technical Compute Farm (TCF) demo. TCF acts as a single entity on the network, integrating Sun Enterprise servers, storage and networking to solve today’s compute-intensive problems.

— German Aerospace Center (DLR) — Airflow Simulation DLR has developed an integration system of Java(TM) and COBRA, known as TENT, which allows DLR to perform multidisciplinary simulations of technical systems. This demo will couple an aerodynamic solver and a multi-body simulation program to simulate the airflow within a jet engine turbofan.

For information on all demonstrations at the Sun booth, please see the related demonstration fact sheet.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision — The Network Is The Computer(TM) — has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that power the Internet and allow companies worldwide to dot-com their businesses. With $17.6 billion in annual revenues, Sun can be found in more than 170 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://sun.com

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