The contest is now closed.  We have received some great entries.  The judging phase has now begun. We expect to announce winners between mid to end of August.

The OpenSPARC Community Innovation Awards Contest is part of Sun's $1 Million Open Source Community Innovation Awards Program, and will be responsible for awarding $175,000 of the $1 Million total prize. The OpenSPARC Contest awards categories and award amounts are as follows:

OpenSPARC Contest categories and award amounts:

• A. Grand Prize: $35,000
• B. First Prizes: ($20,000 each category)
  • i.Best University level Lab Project based on OpenSPARC:
  • ii. Best University level Computer Architecture and/or VLSI course
  • iii. Best Architecture White paper or Application Notes
  • iv. Best New Bus Interface creation as a contribution to the OpenSPARC community
  • v. Best Demo of an application running on an FPGA
  • vi. Best Adaptation of a single-thread application to a multi-thread CMT (Chip Multi Threaded) environment
  • vii. Best submission that makes a substantial contribution to the OpenSPARC community and does not constitute any of the above described Categories

The Grand Prize winner will also be the First Prize Winner in the Category for which the Entry was submitted.

The OpenSPARC Contest will be judged by the OpenSPARC Contest Jury Panel, a group of OpenSPARC industry experts selected from within the OpenSPARC community representing a diverse background of expertise and experience.

Read the complete contest rules.

The OpenSPARC T2 processor is based on the UltraSPARC T2 processor, the world's fastest commodity processor with eight cores and eight threads per core.

Read more for new features in release 1.1

New Features in the Release 1.6 of  OpenSPARC T1

• T1 core supports single- and four-thread options on FPGAs
  
• Reference designs boot OpenSolaris on single- or four-thread mode
  
• Xilinx Virtex-5 technology support
  
• Networking (ftp, telnet) support

These new features are designed to enable a user to build real systems using the OpenSPARC T1 core. For further details on Xilinx, please refer to the Xilinx University program.

Seven major universities are now official OpenSPARC Technology Centers of Excellence:

• University of California, Santa Cruz
• University of Texas, Austin
• University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
• University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
• Carnegie Mellon University
• Stanford University
• University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

Each Center of Excellence has a minimum two-year commitment, during which time they'll execute chip design research and course work based on Sun's chip multi-threading (CMT) design.

Visit our Centers of Excellence web page.

Collaborate and share course material related to OpenSPARC, chip multi-threading, multi-core in many areas including hardware design, design tools, CMT Architecture, software systems design, operating systems, concurrent computing and other related areas.  We're looking for professors who have a passion for teaching and contributing to their field of study by sharing their course material with others.

Take a look at site we are developing and the course materials already available:
http://wiki.opensparc.net/bin/view.pl/CourseMaterial.

We thankful for the support and generosity of professors who choose to share their research, pedagogy, and knowledge to benefit others.