Features:

SUN SEEKS TO SIMPLIFY HPC APPLICATIONS

A new run-time environment and programming language similar to Java is being developed by Sun Microsystems executives. The executives, involved in a military-funded supercomputing project, believe the new developments could greatly simplify the programming of HPC applications.

Other endeavors include data transfer between chips without wires, migrating emerging technologies for on-chip calculations, and improving the cooling systems in upcoming commercial products.

The 90 researchers and engineers involved hope to separate Sun's products from the low-priced clusters running Linux or Windows operating systems.

Sun reported an 8 percent decline in its most recent quarter, with revenue of $2.5 billion, and a net loss of $286 million. Sun only lost $111 million a year ago.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency provided more than $146 million to Sun, IBM, and Cray to boost U.S. efforts in HPC research and development. The High Productivity Computing Systems program delivered an additional $49.7 million to Sun, with another round of funding set for 2006. To achieve optimum performance, the research will focus on ease of programming and extremely fast data transfer.

Experts say that many systems that perform high numbers of math operations per second usually don't execute well on data movement through the computer. In addition to the cost of chip speed, researchers say that customers should judge high performance systems on the cost of moving data.

Corporate R&D departments, which have automated fewer of their processes than other sectors of American business, could also benefit from the technology being developed for the Darpa program.