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SUN MICROSYSTEMS SELECTS UC-DAVIS AS CENTER OF EXCELLENCE

Recognizing University of California-Davis for its contribution to health and safety research and technology, Sun Microsystems Inc announced its selection of this University as a Center of Excellence (COE) in Public Health and Safety. The COE utilizes Sun's Grid computing environment to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of computing resources and enable collaboration among four key research centers to advance experiments and programs.

Sun unveiled the new Center of Excellence during UC Davis' Annual Corporate Sponsor Day for the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), of which Sun is a founding member. Sun recognized UC Davis' contribution to science and research and highlighted its commitment to the COE in order to help educational institutions share ideas and resources to advance research and technologies in the areas of public health and safety.

UC Davis has established a reputation as a premier research university in areas including computational science and engineering, physics, chemistry, and bioinformatics, and they turned to Sun to help continue its advancement as a leading research institution. The Sun solution at UC Davis consists of 57 SunFire V20z servers based on the AMD Opteron processor, and an annual subscription to Sun's Education Software Portfolio. This software portfolio includes software products including Sun Grid Engine Enterprise Edition and the Sun Java Enterprise System. UC Davis is deploying Sun's Grid computing solutions, based on the Sun Grid Infrastructure Reference Architecture, to gain more compute power, better utilize its current compute resources, simplify manageability and improve collaboration among its researchers.

"UC Davis is making amazing contributions to education and research," said Enrique Lavernia, dean of the UC Davis engineering department. "Our selection as a Sun COE will serve as a model to the industry for best practices in the area of technology and research in public health and safety."

"The Sun solution allows UC Davis and its research colleagues to run applications on remote servers, sharing memory subsystems and externalizing graphic cards regardless of the physical location of their systems. They are enabled to maximize the availability and utilization of the computing environment through this approach," said Kim Jones, vice president of global education and research at Sun. "The Sun Center makes it transparent to the user where the computer resides, so it really helps budget-conscious institutions leverage an affordable and versatile computing infrastructure -- something that is key to keeping universities on the cutting edge of research and development."

"We are building a premier public health and safety research program, and that requires an expanded network of technology and resources. Sun's Grid environment is allowing UC Davis to put that network in place," Lavernia added.

One of the key users of the Sun Center of Excellence at UC Davis is the Computational Science and Engineering Center. The focus of this Center is to use computer computation to better understand complex systems by using inter-disciplinary science and engineering. UC Davis is now able to run applications much faster and also run new numeric intensive applications. Another project underway at the Center of Computational Science and Engineering is QuakeSim. The NASA-sponsored initiative is developing computer models to forecast earthquakes with accuracy similar to that of current forecasts for hurricane paths.

Sun's Center of Excellence program includes more than 75 centers worldwide in the areas of high performance computing, computational biology, digital libraries and e-learning.

About Sun Microsystems Inc

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- has propelled Sun Microsystems Inc to its position as a provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide Web at sun.com/.