Sun Microsystems (NSDQ: JAVA)
on Wednesday said Europractice, a European Union-backed nonprofit
technology group, has agreed to promote OpenSparc chip multithreading
technology as a reference design among 650 universities and research
institutions across 38 European countries.
The Europractice microelectronics design-simulation project said it
chose OpenSparc CMT based on the open source technology's advanced
architecture and freely available commercial-caliber designs. The
organization, which is managed by Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the
United Kingdom, believes access to the technology will help boost
Europe's teaching and research efforts in the microprocessor field.
"We are excited about
the potential for future engineering innovations and educational
advances on Sun's OpenSparc technologies," John McLean, head of
Europractice Software Service,
said in a statement released by Sun.
Under the agreement, Europractice and Sun would jointly promote best
practices and curriculum adoption throughout European education
institutions. The available technology under the pact includes the
OpenSparc T1 and T2 processor register transfer-level files, which can
be downloaded from the OpenSparc Web site.
The latest deal adds to similar efforts by Sun and universities in
China, New Zealand, Taiwan, and the United States. Since making
OpenSparc T1 and T2 design files available for free in 2005, there have
been nearly 10,000 downloads, plus another 7,000 downloads of the
software related to the OpenSparc chip, according to Shrenik Mehta,
senior director of front-end technologies and the OpenSparc platform at
Sun.
IT vendors aggressively seek partnerships with academia in
developing technology that eventually gets commercialized and then sent
back to schools as products that are further tested and advanced. In
addition, getting products in front of computer students increases the
chances of them introducing the technology to future employers.
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