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Sun Microsystems, Inc., (Nasdaq:JAVA) and the Ministry of Education
(MOE) for the People's Republic of China today announced a three-year
collaboration agreement designed to meet China's demand for cultivating
integrated circuit (IC) engineering talent and industry development. The
agreement is based on Sun's OpenSPARC(TM) program. MOE selected
OpenSPARC because it is the fastest microprocessor in the world, and Sun
is the only major processor vendor to freely offer its designs to the
open source community. Both the OpenSPARC T1 and OpenSPARC T2 processor
RTL (register transfer level) files can be downloaded at www.opensparc.net.
As a result of the agreement, the Chinese MOE can educate students on
the latest processor innovations, including chip mulithreading (CMT) and
software coding that take advantage of multithreading. Chinese
universities that participate in the program will develop their own
textbooks, workshops and labs programs; the Chinese MOE and Sun will
jointly promote the best practice throughout China. Students will
benefit from the curriculum, and because it is based on Sun's open
architecture they are empowered to accelerate innovation on top of the
OpenSPARC design.
"Today, we extend the OpenSPARC ecosystem to embrace the world's fastest
growing technology community," said Jonathan Schwartz, president and
CEO, Sun Microsystems. "This relationship gives The People’s
Republic of China access to the tools and the freedom to develop the
intellectual property framework it needs to cultivate native
microprocessors and microprocessor engineers, while opening a huge
market for the OpenSPARC community. This is a launching point for
similar relationships with economies and universities worldwide, and an
unmistakable endorsement of Sun's open source approach to building
opportunity across software, systems and microelectronics.”
“We appreciate Sun's open source strategy,
especially Sun's outstanding contribution in the open-sourced IC area,
and we encourage the active cooperation effort between China's
universities and Sun in the teaching and research area,” said Prof. Zhao Qinping, vice minister of MOE. “We
believe the cooperation will be beneficial in advancing China's teaching
and research level in the IC area.”
The collaboration between Sun and MOE will cover three areas:
- Education: train and qualify 100 – 150
educators per year with OpenSPARC technology; select universities in
China to develop "MOE-Sun Excellence Courses" and to leverage
OpenSPARC to enhance experiments and hands-on training.
- Research: universities to collaborate on research projects based on
OpenSPARC; establish OpenSPARC MOE Sun Centers of Excellence to
enhance and expand the research projects.
- Industry Development: establish industry-university cooperation
models; bridge the gap between academic research and industry
productization, help to facilitate the transformation from academic
research results to industry products; incubate IC design firms from
universities to help develop the China IC industry.
“As one of China's leading universities in
microelectronics, Peking University (PKU) never stops its effort in
integrating the front edge technology in the world and the trend of the
industry into its teaching and research,” said Wang Yangyuan, Academician of CAS (Chinese Academy of Science),
Dean of Department of Micro-electronics, Peking University. “OpenSPARC
T2 is one of the most advanced and open-sourced multicore CPU
technologies in the industry. It provides us a great opportunity to
upgrade our processor and SoC design related curricula and research. We
are going to cooperate with Sun in this area to benefit our faculty and
students.”
"CMP (Chip-Multi-Processor) and CMT technologies are the emerging trends
in CPU and SoC design. They provide critical new topics and challenges
for the study and practice of computer architecture,” said Prof. Wang Dongsheng, director of CPU and SoC Center, Tsinghua
University; deputy director of computer architecture committee, China
Computer Federation. “Sun's OpenSPARC open
source project provides an impeccable opportunity for in-depth research
in this area. We look forward to cooperating with Sun in this
area both in terms of teaching and research."
Sun, CMT and OpenSPARC
Sun launched the chip multithreading revolution in 2005, with the
introduction of the UltraSPARC T1 processor, the industry’s
first, eight core, 32 thread, general purpose processor. Through the
efficient use of multiple cores with multiple, parallel threads, the
UltraSPARC T1 proved that CMT is the only effective solution to the
growing gap between processor and memory performance (i.e., memory
latency).
In 2007, Sun introduced the second generation of CMT processors, the
UltraSPARC T2, which doubled the thread count of the UltraSPARC T1, to
64. The UltraSPARC T2 set five world record benchmarks (see footnote1),
thus proving that it was possible to scale a processor's performance
strictly through threading, instead of through higher frequencies and
larger caches. The UltraSPARC T2 is also the only true “system
on a chip” in its class, combining high
compute performance with integrated 10 Gb Ethernet, cryptographic
acceleration, floating point units, and PCI-E controllers. Combined with
the power of the Solaris Operating System (OS) and Sun's LDoms
virtualization technology, the UltraSPARC T2 makes it possible to host
up to 64 logical domains on a single chip.
The UltraSPARC T1 and UltraSPARC T2 RTL has been downloaded over 7,000
times. Sun has also established six major universities as OpenSPARC
Technology Centers of Excellence: the University of California, Santa
Cruz; University of Texas, Austin; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor;
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Stanford University; and
Carnegie Mellon University. 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 multithreading(CMT) design.
The collaboration under this MOU will be in full compliance with U.S.
Export controls and regulations.
Read the original article: http://www.prweb.com/releases/opensparc/ultrasparc/prweb727304.htm
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