Sun stuns with on-time arrival of Niagara III
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Out of Africa and the labs Just weeks after posting a profit, Sun Microsystems has dealt out another shocker â a future version of its UltraSPARC T1 chip should arrive on time.â¦
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At a pivotal moment of the solar cycle, the NASA/ESA Ulysses spacecraft is flying over the sun's mysterious North Pole.
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Sun Microsystems Inc. SUNW.O  and the University of Texas at Austin are set to flip the  switch on Friday on a unique supercomputer that will vastly  speed up massive data analysis and visualization to tackle  time-critical problems such as weather prediction.
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(InfoWorld) - As Sun Microsystems prepares to demonstrate a new high-performance computer Tuesday at a technology conference in Germany, it hopes that quad-core processors from Advanced Micro DevicesÂ that will power the computer arrive on time to deliver one of the machines to its first customer. Sun is going to introduce its Constellation system at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, at which other supercomputer makers are gathering and at which a twice-yearly list of the world's Top 500 supercomputers is to be released Wednesday. IBM, whose Blue Gene/L supercomputer wasÂ No. 1 in a November 2006 Top 500 listÂ based on system performance, will introduce what it says is a still faster Blue Gene/P Tuesday. Sun chose the AMD Opteron quad-core chip,Â code-named Barcelona, over rival Intel'sÂ quad-core Xeon 5300 chip, because it believes AMD's will be "the fastest chip on the market this year," said Andreas Bechtolsheim, chief architect and senior vice president of the systems group at Sun. "We are still hopeful that they will deliver the chips on time." Sun also hopes Constellation can be out in time to be considered for the November Top 500 list. AMD's stock was downgraded June 6 by some investment analysts who questioned the chip maker's ability to deliver Barcelona on time. But AMD spokesman Phil Hughes said Monday that "we're still on track" for a Barcelona launch in the third quarter. Constellation is targeting IBM, which held an industry-leading 47.8 percent market share on the earlier Top 500 list, because its Blue Gene line is "the fastest machine out there," Bechtolsheim acknowledged. But Sun's Constellation is built with open industry standard components, such as x64 processors, Sun blade servers, Sun Fire x4500 storage, and open source Solaris or Linux operating system software, while IBM's Blue Gene is built from custom-made components. "Our observation is that industry standard open architecture has caught up with special-purpose computers. That's what we really mean to say here," Bechtolsheim said. Sun believes that building a supercomputer from custom parts takes too much time and costs too much money to build. But building a custom machine may allow IBM to pull further ahead of the rest of the field. IBM claims in a news release that the coming Blue Gene/P has triple the performance of version L, including a potential top processing speed of 3 petaflops (P flops). A petaflop is 1,000 trillion flops (floating-point operations per second), a measure of how many computer calculations can be made in that time. Sun says the Constellation features a total 131,072 processor cores, can operate at up to 1.08 petaflops, has 100TB of memory, and an input-output (I/O) speed (the speed at which data can be moved in and out of the central processing unit) of 3TBps. A terabyte is 1 trillion bytes. The Top 500 supercomputers list, compiled by university researchers in the U.S. and Germany, ranks supercomputer systems that are usually operated in government or university research centers in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Sun is in the process of building a Constellation supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computer Center (TACC) at the University of Texas in Austin. The TACC received a $59 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation in 2006 to build the supercomputer.
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WASHINGTON -- After three dark years, the sun finally peeked through yesterday at the Aerospace Industries Association&#39;s annual year-end review.
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The Story: Sun Microsystems has been in and out of the (metaphorical) grave more often than Count Dracula. The one-time king of the Internet servers suffered a body blow when the dot-com bubble burst, and since then it?s been a struggle to keep the company?s name on the buy lists of enterprise IT shoppers. That struggle has been chronicled by endless stories in the trade and financial press with headlines featuring bad puns like ?The Sun is setting.?                                                    Those days are finally, if quietly, coming to a close.[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]In less than two years in the CEO?s chair, Jonathan Schwartz has put the company firmly in the black and, after years of bleeding, resuscitated Sun?s flagging software business and storage businesses, and put together a product road map that Morgan Stanley analyst Katherine Hubert calls its strongest in years.?You have to credit Schwartz because he understands the way to combine hardware and software,? says Bud Mathaisel, CIO of outsourced-IT provider Achievo. ?Although Sun?s image slipped from public view, they were making very competitive technology and pricing.?Sun?s line of Galaxy and blade servers are hits across a wide swatch of businesses, and its storage business is growing. Sun has already entered the market for quad-core servers (while rival AMD?s Barcelona remains problem-plagued), and in the next year or so Sun will roll out new server, storage, and networking products. Also, Sun acquired SeeBeyond in August 2007, a $387 million buy that positions Sun to become a vendor of choice in the race to provide the integration tools needed to support enterprises? SOA strategies.The powerful new hardware lineup, plus the enterprise service bus that came with SeeBeyond once again makes Sun core to the datacenter.Not all of the credit goes to Schwartz, of course. His predecessor, cofounder Scott McNealy, poured hundreds of millions into R&amp;D in the dark days of 2002 and created the UltraSparc T1 (or Niagara), the server chip that?s keeping Sun competitive with larger rivals IBM, HP, and Dell.What?s more, McNealy had the foresight to bring back hardware wizard Andy Bechtolsheim in 2004. Bechtolsheim led Sun efforts to design the AMD Opteron-based Sun Fire x64 servers ? better known by their code name ?Galaxy? ? that were key to Sun?s datacenter reentry.The Bottom Line: Sun?s transition from leader to laggard and back to contender has been very painful, particularly because of the deeps cuts in personnel Sun has been forced to make. But the numbers ? four profitable quarters in a row plus record margins ? as well as a growing list of wins, point to a company on the upswing. Sun may not be at the top of everybody?s vendor list, but once again, it?s worth your consideration.Complete list of 2007 underreported tech stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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Switch blade Sun Microsystems has introduced the Sun Blade 6000 Modular System, which offers a choice of blades powered by the UltraSPARC T1 processor with CoolThreads technology, Intel Xeon processors, or AMD Opteron processors and supports Solaris, Windows, and Linux operating systems.â¦
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With eruptions from a large and complex sunspot group sending a series of solar storms to Earth, the stage is set for spectacular displays of the Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis this week.
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(CP) - Steve Nash received a warm reception in his emotional first game back in Dallas. The Victoria native scored 17 points and had 18 assists, many setting up Amare Stoudemire&#39;s 34 points, leading the Suns
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A major flare on the Sun earlier this week generated what scientists are calling a solar tsunami.
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By Kurt Loft, Tampa Tribune, Fla.  Jun. 22--CAPE CANAVERAL -- The first day of summer in Florida delivered the expected storm clouds -- and a shower of disappointment -- as the shuttle Atlantis was forced to stay in orbit at least one more day.
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The new Japanese spacecraft sent into orbit in September to study the Sun has returned its first scientific data.
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34,600 staff take a deep breath Sun Microsystems has given the official word â its employees can hold their heads high.â¦
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Weather permitting, Southwestern Ontario residents will be treated to an enchanting celestial show tonight. Along with most of the rest of North America, the London region will be front-row centre for the
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. _ Illuminated by 40 pure-white Xenon spotlights and the golden glare of five powerful rocket engines, shuttle Discovery and its seven astronauts thundered into space tonight.  Liftoff came right on schedule at 8:47 p.m.
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A blog entry from Sun's second in command, Jonathan Schwartz, is indicating that a demo of Solaris capable of running on IBM's PowerPC architecture is on its way. When asked for comment a Sun spokesperson told BetaNews, "We don't have anything more to say about it at this point beyond what is in Jonathan's blog." More detailed information on Solaris 10 is available from BetaNews.
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That appears to be the flag Sun Microsystems will be waving today as it officially unveils Solaris 10 (even though the OS won&#39;t actually ship until January).