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Sun Microsystems is tapping the brain power of UC Santa Cruz
researchers to help improve one of its most common microprocessors
while offering undergraduates rare, hands-on experience with the tools
of the trade.
Under a partnership announced Thursday, the Santa Clara-based
company will establish a lab on campus where students and researchers
can pore over the architectural blueprints for a microchip that was
once proprietary, but which Sun recently made free and downloadable
using the approach of "open-source" software.
Sun Microsystems is tapping the brain power of UC Santa Cruz
researchers to help improve one of its most common microprocessors
while offering undergraduates rare, hands-on experience with the tools
of the trade.
Under a partnership announced Thursday, the Santa Clara-based
company will establish a lab on campus where students and researchers
can pore over the architectural blueprints for a microchip that was
once proprietary, but which Sun recently made free and downloadable
using the approach of "open-source" software.
"This is a new thing in the industry, the first time a big company
has opened up a microprocessor to the public," said Jose Renau, a
professor of computer engineering.
Microprocessors are essentially the brain centers of personal computers, servers and a wide variety of electronic devices.
The goal of the partnership is to create a community in Santa Cruz
that can share tweaks and upgrades to the Niagra Sparc chip via the
Web, said Renau. Open-source platforms have been popularized in recent
years by user-generated content Web sites like Wikipedia.com and Linux, the enormously successful operating system that is maintained and modified by an army of volunteers.
In turn, students will benefit by gaining access to the previously
unseen inner workings of microprocessors. Course curriculums in the
computer engineering department will soon incorporate lessons in the
chip's design, and students may eventually be able to use the
information to fabricate their own silicon and copper-wired microchip.
The company also hopes the three-year, $110,000 contract with UCSC
will be a springboard for promoting wider use of its Niagra Sparc chip,
a technology that, since it was developed in the early 1990s, has been
unable to gain a market beyond Sun's computers.
They want the chip's underlying codes and schematics, called
OpenSPARC, to be used by professional software developers and other
university groups.
As of last week, OpenSPARC has been downloaded more than 4,500 times.
"We anticipate that [the university's] efforts will not only deliver
great benefits to the OpenSPARC community but will also positively
impact the future course of how all microprocessors are designed," said
Kim Jones, vice president of global education and sales at Sun.
The new lab is to be called OpenSPARC The Center for Excellence and
will be housed in the Engineering 2 building. Renau said other projects
may benefit from the new servers and other equipment from Sun.
Read the original article: http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2007/March/02/local/stories/08local.htm
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