Sun's Unconventional Thinkers Contrarian Minds

Leslie Lambert's job is managing a paradox. A worldwide paradox. A paradox that involves unfettered access and the opposite of unfettered access. The job involves vulnerability assessments, intrusion detection, and incident management. It involves virus protection and spam filtering. All on a network that spans more than 100 countries. And those are just the basics. What Lambert would call the easy part.  More

You don't have to be a genius to see that search technology is far from perfect. Google does a decent job on the Web, but ... "Search is more than just the Web," says Steve Green, the principal investigator in Sun's research into advanced search technologies. While searching for documents on the Web is a difficult challenge, the Web is full of links and, as Google discovered, those links are important indicators of what people find valuable. More

 A Distinguished Engineer, VP, and CTO, Dan Berg juggles roles and perceptions. Most of his time, in fact, is spent challenging customers and employees to think differently. To customers, he says, "You know what? We're not what you think we are." To Sun's far-flung engineers -- in Bangalore, Beijing, St. Petersberg, Prague, Tel Aviv, and elsewhere -- he says, "It's okay to challenge the current thinking." More

Chris Gerhard could have made things much easier on himself.

Awhile back, Gerhard -- now Chief Technologist and Principal Engineer in the Systems Technical Service Center in Sun Services -- wrote a program that enabled him to easily fix a problem customers were having with a database application.

"It never struck me as being rocket science, but it turns out nobody else was doing it," he says. "The mistake I made from an ease-of-life point of view is I gave it to other people. Had I kept it to myself, then all these problems would still be happening and I could solve them very very quickly."

But what would be the fun of that?

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Sometimes the smallest things can make a big difference. Take mobile phones. They're tiny but drive huge amounts of traffic in telecommunications (where Sun sells an awful lot of its systems). But, as Roger Meike puts it, "There are 6 or 7 billion people in the world and we've already got Java on billions of cell phones, so at some point it's a limited market." A few years ago Meike, a senior research director in Sun Labs, began to ponder an interesting question: What could be bigger than cell phones? The answer was something much smaller. More

Here's the thing: Sun has a widely distributed workforce. As do a lot of companies. Consider, for example, the team working on Project Wonderland. It's composed of engineers on opposite sides of the United States and opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Their situation is hardly unique. Which is the point of Project Wonderland. "The challenge is how do you encourage innovation in an environment where teams are very distributed? How do you make that better?" says Wonderland architect Paul Byrne. More

When he was still a doctoral student, Mark Moir took a highly contrarian stance. "The way I got into what I'm doing now is I saw some of the early ideas and I said, 'It all sounds very nice but there's no way it's ever going to work, and I'm going to be the one to prove it's impossible,'" he recalls. What he's doing now is making the impossible possible -- developing ways to build systems that are fast, scalable, concurrent, and correct. All that thanks to a radical rethinking of transactional memory. More

The Lively Kernel is designed to take Web programming forward and backward at the same time. Led by Dan Ingalls, a Distinguished Engineer in Sun Labs, the project comes down to the simplicity that should have been there from the start. "I've always felt that Web programming was more complicated than it needed to be," Ingalls says. "I look at Web pages and go, 'Whoa! This doesn't look like what I would normally do.'" So, about a year ago, he and his colleagues started looking at ways to uncomplicate Web programming. More

Dean Nelson leads a seven-person team that has been consolidating Sun datacenters and labs around the world and saving the company millions of dollars. "This is not rocket science," he says. But, by using one simple concept, along with several best-of-breed products, Nelson and team have not only saved Sun a boatload of cash, they have made the company more agile. More

In 40 years of programming high-performance systems, Harriet Coverston has never been this excited. The chief architect of QFS -- a distributed file system with near raw I/O performance -- Coverston is no stranger to ground-breaking projects. But this is different. What she's working on now represents a complete paradigm shift in data storage. More

This is one of those stories where a common problem inspires an uncommon solution. The problem, in this case, was that an important file had been inadvertently deleted. No big deal. That's why we have backup systems, right? Well, yes, but ... "In the end we weren't able to get it back," recalls Glenn Scott, a senior researcher in Sun Labs. That got him thinking: What would it take to make a storage system that didn't need to be backed up? More

Brian Wong wants to liberate data storage. For 40 years, storage has been a slave to the computer, doing only the most menial tasks and not allowed to even know why. Wong, a Distinguished Engineer in Sun's software group, sees that as a huge waste. "It doesn't give the storage much opportunity to help," he says. In other words, what worked for 40 years is too limited to take us where we need to go. More

As microprocessors have gotten smaller and faster, the wires within them have gotten smaller and slower. "A wire is kind of like a garden hose. A narrow hose will give you less flow than a big hose," says Distinguished Engineer Ron Ho. "Today we manufacture chips using a 65 nanometer process. We're going to move eventually to a 45 nanometer process and to a 32 nanometer process. As wires get smaller, my garden hose is getting narrower." That's going to be a problem. Which is why Ho and his colleagues in Sun Labs are working on "Cool Wires" now. More

Sun became famous for declaring, long before it was evident to others, that "the network is the computer." That much is well known. But as Sunay Tripathi puts it: "You can never say, 'Okay, I'm the leader now. I'm done.'" What's less well known is that this 10-year Sun veteran has been a key player in helping Sun to live up to its slogan and once again forge ahead of the pack. He's also the man with a "slightly wicked plan" to help the company recapture a market it walked away from 15 years ago. More

Jeff Kesselman wants to be clear about one thing: Games are a business. Sure, they're fun and, sure, you may find yourself looking up at 4 a.m. only to realize you've been playing all night, but that doesn't change the fundamental fact. This is business. Serious business. "Games are the second biggest media business today," says the chief architect of Darkstar, Sun's game server. Bigger than the music business. Second only to the movies, in all their various forms and formats. More