Sun Microsystems launched its Eco Advantage Program to help its partners green their IT practices.

The program is part of the company's Eco Innovation initiatives unveiled last year to help customers operate with a smaller IT environmental impact. Eco Advantage offers several services as well as access to some of Sun's latest products, such as its new SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 server, scalable archive products and its virtualized Solaris Operating System.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Wind River Systems, Inc. today announced that Wind River will port its Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) and Workbench development suite to Sun's UltraSPARC T2 chip multithreading (CMT) processor. Wind River Platform for Network Equipment, Linux Edition, will be the first carrier grade Linux for Sun's CMT processors. With this announcement, Sun and Wind River will be providing the networking industry with a fully integrated, optimized and tested solution of the industry's leading multicore processing hardware and CGL, enabling companies to quickly develop and deploy next-generation enabled networking applications. Sun's Netra Carrier Grade rack servers and ATCA blades will be the first CMT systems to run Wind River Carrier Grade Linux.

There is still enough competition in the Unix space to make vendors hate to see each other get the limelight. Which is one of the reasons why Sun Microsystems has timed the launch of its "Victoria Falls" Sparc T2+ multicore processor and the related "Maramba" server line in the same week that IBM is launching big Power6 boxes and Hewlett-Packard is rolling out an update to its HP-UX Unix and a repackaging of the software.

Sun Microsystems (NSDQ: JAVA) and partner Fujitsu on Wednesday launched two co-developed servers based on the UltraSparc T2 Plus processor, which the companies say will make it possible for customers to consolidate more data center applications on a single machine.

The CMT Sparc Enterprise T5140 and T5240 are the first dual-socket, general-purpose servers powered by the UltraSparc T2 Plus, the vendors said. The processor makes it possible to offer up to 128 compute threads in compact one- or two-rack units, and two to four times more memory and internal capacity than competitive x86 systems.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) and Fujitsu Limited (TSE:6702) today expanded the Sun and Fujitsu SPARC Enterprise server line with the introduction of two new systems based on the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor. Scaling from the edge of the network to the heart of the enterprise, the third-generation CMT SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers deliver breakthrough performance and scalability and help enable customers to consolidate the datacenter into an ultra-dense, energy efficient compute environment, optimized and managed by the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS). The SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers deliver up to 16 times higher compute density than competitive two-socket x86 systems and up to 32 times higher compute density than competitive four-socket x86 systems. The Sun and Fujitsu SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers provide up to three times more performance than competitive RISC systems in half the space.

Chips Can Handle More Instructions At the Same Time

Sun Microsystems Inc. is announcing a big jump in the performance of its small server systems, the latest example of a trend to push computer chips to do many jobs at once.

The company says the new servers can simultaneously carry out up to 128 computing instructions, known as threads. Not all programs can take advantage of such "multithreaded" chips, but some customers are reporting impressive results.

IBM Corp. began shipping high-end computers Tuesday built around the fastest chip on Earth, a microprocessor that can carry out up to 5 billion instructions per second, surpassing the speediest competing processors built by rivals like Intel or Sun Microsystems.

Through new research, standards and tools, the industry is just starting to address what's being called a software gap between a rising tide of multicore processors and a lack of parallel programming tools and techniques to make use of them.

The gap came into stark focus in the embedded world at the Multicore Expo here this week, where chip makers Freescale, Intel and MIPS and a handful of silicon startups sketched out directions for their multicore products. Others warned that the industry has its work cut out for it delivering the software that will harness the next-generation chips.

The past few years have seen some major changes in Sun hardware. The return of Andy Bechtolsheim has brought forth an impressive array of new server hardware, and reinvented Sun as an x86 server vendor. But where does that leave the SPARC?

For many years the SPARC processor was lauded as the only high-end business platform worth investing in, and sales of SPARC-based servers and workstations were nearly as high as the prices. In the eighties and nineties, a tour through any financial company was roughly the same as a tour through a Sun showroom. In the late nineties that began to change, as Linux and even Solaris x86 began to surge in popularity due to the extremely low cost and reasonable performance. Since then, the performance game has left the SPARC platform bereft.

When it comes to computing technology, the research goal of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency can be summed up in two words: power and speed.

In the latter category, Sun Microsystems Inc. yesterday announced that DARPA has awarded it up to $44.3 million to spend on research on the use of optical technology to speed up communications between different microprocessors in a system.