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Sun's R&D spectrum

Sun Labs' current projects include supercomputers, high-speed networking, and more

By Gary H. Anthes, IDG News Service, 06/06/05

June 6, 2005—Mention Sun Microsystems to someone, and it's likely to evoke images of high-powered workstations, dot-com servers, and Java. But a peek inside Sun Microsystems Laboratories reveals a much broader array of emerging technologies and hints at a new Sun rising.

Sun Labs in Menlo Park, Calif., employs some 200 scientists and engineers and spends 0 million to 00 million a year. Its projects include sensors, supercomputers, high-speed networking, optical interconnects, third-generation Web technologies, Java, and more. Its mission: "To solve hard technical problems brought to us by our customers," says Glenn T. Edens, director of Sun Labs.

Making the switch

For example, Internet switches capable of handling tens to hundreds of terabits of traffic per second today cost millions of dollars and fill entire rooms. But if an ongoing project at Sun Labs is successful, such switches will have dimensions and price tags more like those of PCs. "It's a high-risk, high-return project. We think it will work, but we don't actually know," Edens says.

Ultracheap, high-capacity switches are just one potential application of a technology called proximity communication that Sun announced last fall. Proximity I/O, as it's also known, can enable processor chips to communicate 60 times faster and with 30 times less energy than is possible using conventional means.

"Proximity allows us to very nicely spread a switch out over a number of chips and have enough bandwidth between them so we can have a distributed switch," says Robert Drost, a research scientist at Sun Labs. "Proximity" refers to the positioning of two chips extremely close to each other, each with transmitter and receiver circuits. Data is sent across the gap by "capacitive coupling," which is coupling between charged particles that are at rest. It's simple in principle, but it's devilishly difficult to align the chips to tolerances of a few microns.

In proximity I/O, the long communication paths on printed circuit boards with soldered connections and wires are replaced by the tiny, simple interchip gaps. "When processors went from 10 MHz to 3 GHz, they didn't become 30 times faster, because the bandwidth didn't increase by 30 times; it increased by two or three times," Drost says. "[Proximity I/O] will finally realize the potential performance on the chip."

In addition, he says, very fast interchip communications could reduce the need to have big on-chip caches, freeing up scarce chip real estate for other kinds of processing functions.

Supercomputers

Last July, Sun won a three-year, 0 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to design a supercomputer with ultrahigh internal bandwidth based on proximity I/O. IBM and Cray each won awards for designs based on different principles.

Drost says the supercomputer will be "massively parallel," with hundreds of thousands of threads executing in parallel. It will excel at problems that require a lot of interprocessor communications, such as database searches, scientific simulations, and signal processing. If Sun wins approval to build a working machine in the next phase, one or more prototypes could be installed by 2009, Drost says. Those machines would run at sustained speeds of 1 quadrillion floating-point operations per second (PFLOPS), about 15 times faster than the fastest supercomputer today, and be scalable to 4PFLOPS.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.