OpenSPARC University Program

OpenSPARC offers an excellent platform for research, collaboration and a great learning opportunity for students.

The goal of the OpenSPARC University Program is to work closely with the best and the brightest in academia to:

• help academic institutions build industry relevant curriculum
• prepare students to power the participation age
• grow the OpenSPARC Community

The are many potential areas for research, take a look at one possible list.

The OpenSPARC University Program helps universities kick-start their curricula and research projects by providing FPGA equipment grants.

You may apply here for FPGA donation in areas such as:

• Curriculum Integration: The integration of OpenSPARC technology in undergraduate and graduate level courses including the development and sharing of model curricula on OpenSPARC.net.
• Community Development: The sponsorship of a OpenSPARC community development projects that align with the academic and research interests of your students, faculty and researchers and result in 'put-backs' to the community sharing site, OpenSPARC.net.
• Community Outreach: Promote broad awareness of OpenSPARC technologies on campus and participation of faculty, students and other members of the academic community in OpenSPARC communities through events, and workshops.
• Research: Multiple areas are of interest such as high performance, multi-threaded and low power computing.
  

Xilinx OpenSPARC FPGA Board

To increase access to the state-of-the-art Chip Multi-threading (CMT) technology to the developers, engineers at Sun Microsystems and Xilinx Inc. have made available an FPGA development kit for the academic and research purposes. This kit will allow designers to develop and test novel ideas in the areas of computer architecture, logic design, parallel programming, and compiler techniques, among others.

Development board included in the kit is Xilinx Virtex 5 technology and can easily fit multi-threaded OpenSPARC T1 core. Reference design included in the OpenSPARC T1 download bundle can also boot enterprise class OpenSolaris operating system making it a robust development platform.

This OpenSPARC Evaluation Platform, together with the, reference design will be an excellent starting point for researchers and entrepreneurs to build and test novel ideas in hardware and software design.

Important information regarding the shipping costs and import duties: Sun Microsystems will pay for the standard shipping costs related to US and non-US shipments. For the non-US shipments, customers are responsible for paying any import duties and/or other local taxes.

Sun's Xilinx OpenSPARC FPGA Evaluation Kits will be donated to the university professor for use by students or student groups. Students should have their advisor or sponsoring professor to submit the donation request and include the proposal for how the FPGA kit will be used.

Apply for your Xilinx OpenSPARC FPGA today!

Deadline

For donation applications received by the 15th of the month, you should received a notification by the end of the month.

To obtain the FPGA development tools from Xilinx, including ISE, EDK, and Chipscope, visit Xilinx's University Program. We recommend you apply for these tools before you receive the OpenSPARC Evaluation Platform. This will ensure that the software tool chain is ready when the hardware arrives. Also make sure that this application is initiated by a professor involved in this research and/or course work, and not by a student.

One can also order OpenSPARC Evaluation Platform directly from Digilent. For pricing and ordering information, go to Digilent.

Grants are made on a published quarterly calendar and are for hardware donations only. Grants do not include maintenance, service or technical support. Grants must be reviewed and supported by the local Education Sales Representative. Grants are valid for 60 days from the date of the award. The priorities that Sun uses to make investment decisions are reviewed and published annually.

Eligibility Guidelines

In the United States, Higher Education eligible institutions must have:

• 3304(f) or a 501(c)(3) or Section 115 tax exempt status
• be a degree granting institution or be involved in basic research

Outside of the United States, institutions must either be degree-granting or involved in basic research and be recognized as a non-commercial enterprise by their national government.

Non-profit institutions with 501(c)(3) status which are neither degree-granting nor directly involved with basic research may be eligible if they directly support the academic and research communities in their mission to create and disseminate knowledge, and if they can demonstrate financial need.

We Want To Hear From You

The OpenSPARC Program group, is very interested in following the progress of your project. We would therefore appreciate receiving quarterly feedback on the progress of your project, as per the guidelines on our Project Progress/Feedback Form. Questions? Contact Us at any time.

Questions? Contact Us.