At the International Conference for Field Programmable Logic and Applications today, Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Xilinx, Inc. unveiled a feature-rich, high-performance programmable OpenSPARC evaluation platform. The platform provides academic researchers and hardware developers with a flexible OpenSPARC-based platform to create, customize and deploy next-generation applications for a broad set of end markets including supercomputers, industrial, scientific and medical (ISM), aerospace & defense, and storage and networking.

"Our collaboration with industry leaders such as Xilinx will continue to drive the momentum and expansion of the UltraSPARC ecosystem," said Mike Knudsen, vice president, business development and marketing for Sun's Microelectronics unit. "The microprocessor industry is steadily shifting towards CMT architectures, and this new OpenSPARC FPGA evaluation platform puts us in a prime position to enable faster time-to-market for our customers."

Sun Microsystems, Inc., with the support of the Embedded Software Consortium under the Ministry of Education announced today the partnership with National Taiwan University, National Tsing Hua University, and National Chiao Tung University to promote OpenSPARC technology development.

In an announcment held on July 7th, in Taipei, Sridhar Vajapey, Sun Microsystems, gave the opening and talked about OpenSPARC program followed by Dr. Shyu, Dean of EECS of Tsing Hua University, representing MOE's SoC program, and Dr. Lee, Professor of Tsing Hua University and Director for MOE's ESW program, followed by Joe Pai, Sun's GM for Taiwan. All were very thankful to Sun for making such leading design and technology to Taiwan's institution and were giving a very high expectation on how this program would potentially benefit Taiwan's technology and industrial advancement in the future. 

Haskell.org and Sun Microsystems are proud to announce a joint project to exploit the high performance capabilities of Sun's latest multi-core OpenSPARC systems via Haskell!

Sun has donated a powerful 8 core SPARC Enterprise T5120 Server to the Haskell community, and $10,000 to fund a student, to further develop support for high performance Haskell on the SPARC. 

The aim of the project is to improve the SPARC native code generator in GHC and to demonstrate and improve the results of parallel Haskell benchmarks. The student will work with a mentor from Haskell.org and an adviser from Sun's SPARC compiler team.

Haskell to announce that we have chosen Ben Lippmeier for the OpenSPARC project. Congratulations Ben! Ben will spend three months hacking on GHC to make it perform well on the latest multi-core OpenSPARC chips.

Read more at haskell.org

The OpenSPARC T2 processor is based on the UltraSPARC T2 processor, the world's fastest commodity processor with eight cores and eight threads per core.

Read more for new features in release 1.1

New Features in the Release 1.6 of  OpenSPARC T1

• T1 core supports single- and four-thread options on FPGAs
  
• Reference designs boot OpenSolaris on single- or four-thread mode
  
• Xilinx Virtex-5 technology support
  
• Networking (ftp, telnet) support

These new features are designed to enable a user to build real systems using the OpenSPARC T1 core. For further details on Xilinx, please refer to the Xilinx University program.

Eight major universities are now official OpenSPARC Technology Centers of Excellence:

• University of California, Santa Cruz
• University of Texas, Austin
• University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
• University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
• Carnegie Mellon University
• Stanford University
• University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
• Peking University, China
  

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 multi-threading (CMT) design.

Visit our Centers of Excellence web page.

Collaborate and share course material related to OpenSPARC, chip multi-threading, multi-core in many areas including hardware design, design tools, CMT Architecture, software systems design, operating systems, concurrent computing and other related areas.  We're looking for professors who have a passion for teaching and contributing to their field of study by sharing their course material with others.

Take a look at site we are developing and the course materials already available:
http://wiki.opensparc.net/bin/view.pl/CourseMaterial.

We thankful for the support and generosity of professors who choose to share their research, pedagogy, and knowledge to benefit others.