Sun continues to shatter world records with its x64 servers! The Sun Fire X4450 server -- powered by four Quad-core Intel Xeon X7350 processors; the Solaris 10 OS; and the latest version of Sun's Java Platform, Standard Edition software -- delivered top-notch four-socket performance on the SPECjbb2005 benchmark. The 2U server, at least half the size of competitive servers, obtained a World Record score of 464,355 SPECjbb2005 bops (58,044 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM) for all four-socket systems.

For more info and competitive comparisons, check out the benchmark details.

In the last eight weeks, more than 14 patents have been issued to Sun Laboratories researchers.  Some of these are first-time recepients of patents, others have several under their belts.  Here are some highlights:

• Method and apparatus  for using memory compression to enhance error correction, Gregory M. Wright; Mario I. Wolczko
  
• Selecting  basis functions to form a regression model for cache performance, Ilya Gluhovsky;  David Vengerov; John R. Busch    
• Transparent switch using optical and electrical  proximity communication, John E. Cunningham; Ashok V. Krishnamoorthy; Ronald Ho; Robert J. Drost
• Floating point divider with embedded  status information, Guy L. Steele, Jr.  
• Blinded encryption and decryption, Radia J. Perlman 

See Sun’s Center of Excellence (COE) program for the education community in action in this great video showing the construction of the COE at the Lurcerne University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland. To learn more, I contacted the student host, Michael Thalman, for an interview. Responsible for system, network and SAN administration, he keeps the Enterprise Lab running.  

Rebecca: “What’s so special about this lab?”

Michael: “Opened in December 2006, the lab is a really flexible environment that lets us be as open as possible, involving students in lab administration and supporting their ideas as much as we can. From a technical point of view, we are using an advanced framework developed with a great deal of help from Sun Switzerland. It allows us to switch systems instantly: it’s somewhat similar to replacing hard drives to boot other systems, but it uses SAN virtualization technologies to manage this virtually without physically going into the lab.”

[Bruno, the other person in the video, is the Head of the Enterprise Lab and Michael's boss.]

Rebecca: “Bruno, how did this lab get started?”

Bruno: “I met Scott McNealy when I worked at the Sun Dublin office. After I returned to Switzerland and started my job as an assistant professor at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences, I was asked to build a curriculum for distributed enterprise application. For the hands-on part of the course, I had two choices: .Net or Java. This put me in mind of Scott so I sent him an email to ask for help. He responded within six hours—I couldn’t believe it! From there, we got into a discussion about the University’s needs and then agreed to cooperate to build a lab for education and research purposes.”

Here is a press release issued at the opening of the lab. The lab was described fittingly as “a playground where they [students] can work creatively and without stress.”

Here is a link to the lab’s website. And information on joining the COE program.

The Uptime Institute recognized Sun with a Green Enterprise IT Award for the our work on our energy-sipping Santa Clara datacenter, as outlined in the whitepaper - "Aligning Business Organizations: Sun's approach for building energy-efficient datacenters."

Dean Nelson, Sun senior director of global lab and datacenter design services, accepted the award
tonight and provided an overview of Sun's eco responsibility efforts to Ken Brill, Executive Director of the Uptime Institute, in a podcast you can find here.

The official award name is a bit of a tongue-twister - Best-in-Class Implementation Winner for the 2008 Uptime Institute Green Enterprise IT Awards in the category of Energy Efficient IT Hardware Deployment. Click here for full details on the awards.

In case you missed it, this week's eWeek Magazine features Sun on the cover.  A pic of Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green. Inside is a Q&A with those two execs talking about Sun's emphasis on open source and how it is helping to revitalize the company.  Here's a portion:

"Open source is a means to an end. It's a mechanism to grow the broadest market, build the largest ecosystem, reach the maximum set of opportunities ... but just because you've reached the market doesn't mean you've effectively built the business. It's the difference between being popular and being successful."

--Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president and CEO 

To read the entire article click here.

Joe Hartley, VP of Global Government, Education and Healthcare, traveled to Shanghai last week to present at the Sun China ERC. Joe talked about the power of communities and what they mean for education, now and in the future.

More than 500 representatives from the China Ministry of Education, the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission, CERNET, and other Chinese universities participated in the event.

We had a busy week at the Sun Worldwide Education and Research Conference in San Francisco. Mr. Xu Ming, Counsellor of the China Ministry of Education joined Mr. Scott McNealy on stage to announce an OpenSPARC program for Chinese students. KTSF Channel 26 mandarin news reported on the story.

KTSF Channel 26

There were so many great speakers at the conference. I was really honored to meet Dr. Kathy Sullivan, the first American woman to walk in space. Kathy logged 532 hours in space and had been on three space shuttle missions. She told me that being in the shuttle is like “riding a controlled explosion.” Kathy, like Sun, is working hard to nurture young students. Kathy has a passion for igniting in others the wonder and importance of science, math and technology. She currently serves as Director for Ohio State University's Battelle Center for Mathematics and Science Education Policy.

Kathy Sullivan with Joe Hartley, Vice President, Global Government, Education and Healthcare

We invited five Sun Campus Ambassadors to attend the conference. They are Ezequiel Singer from Argentina, Greg Corbin, Kumar Abhishek from India and Vincent Ding from China, and Sergey Pisarenko from Sweden.

Sun Campus Ambassadors with Scott McNealy 

If you missed any of the sessions, we will be posting them here. Look forward to seeing you at the next WWERC in China!

Sun today announced that the Chinese Ministry of Education (MOE) signed a three-year agreement based on Sun’s OpenSPARC program.  The MOE sees OpenSPARC as a great way to cultivate integrated circuit engineers, and we at Sun are excited about expanding the OpenSPARC community throughout the world’s most populous country.

The MOE will start with three of China’s most prestigious universities – Peking University, Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University – with plans to expand to approximately 10 universities by the end of this year.

So how does open sourcing SPARC help Sun?  The simplest way to think of it is that the students of today are developers of tomorrow. It’s key to win the mindshare of these future developers who will be key decision makers on which platforms (including servers) our customers will use.

Here is a photo of Sun Chairman Scott McNealy and Counsellor Mr. XU Ming of the MOE today at the Worldwide Education Conference (WWERC) in San Francisco. 

Did you know that researchers at the Warren Wilson College is measuring values of water quality, soil and other features of the Panamanian jungle right from their lab in North Carolina? This is just one of the many things Sun SPOT can do.

We are inviting students, professors, and researchers to experience the power of Sun SPOT. Mary Grush from Campus Technology spoke with Arshan Poursohi of Sun Labs recently to learn more about the technology.

Sun SPOT is now available in 36 countries. If you live and study in one of these countries, please contact us to see how Sun SPOT can help with your research.

Sun has revamped its portal for student developers who are ready to innovate and create the future—starting now! Get access to hot downloads, open source communities, job opportunities and more.

The result is more reliable, scalable realtime applications for the Web, leveraging developers' existing Java skills. Kaazing is proof that the “write once, run anywhere” value of Java continues to be important. According to Kaazing CTO John Fallows, “As far as we're concerned, the enterprise equals Java.”

Chris Shipley, executive producer of DEMO, says, “Kaazing has the potential to revolutionize the Web and become the backbone of rich Internet applications.”

Here are some candid shots of the Kaazing crew from DEMO and you can see their six-minute stage demo here.

CEO Jonas Jacobi goes on the big stage at DEMO where you have six minutes—exactly!—to demo your new product for 700 VCs, bizdev folks, fellow entrepreneurs, press and others. The pressure is on!

Ric Smith, Director of Business and Product Strategy, and Brian Albers, VP of Development, “on keyboard and drums.”

Co-founders Fallows and Jacobi relax after hours.

Panelists will debate the top threats and challenges to privacy now and in the future; what's being done at individual companies and industry wide; the need for personal information management, and much more. Please see details below.

*Jim Allen, Chief Privacy Officer, Agilent
*Michelle Dennedy, Chief Privacy Officer, Sun Microsystems
*Dr. Moira Gunn, Host of NPR's Tech Nation and BioTech Nation
*Barbara Lawler, Chief Privacy Officer, Intuit
*Joanne McNabb, CIPP/G, Chief, California Office of Privacy Protection
*Deirdre Mulligan, Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the
Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, UC Berkeley School of Law

Where:
Sun's Menlo Park, CA campus
10 Network Circle, Menlo Park, CA 94025

When:
Wednesday, December 12, from 11 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. PT

Industry experts, members of the press and analyst communities, please RSVP to Asa Fenton of Bite Communications at asa.fenton@bitepr.com or 415-365-0482.

Sun Achieves World Record SAP Sales and Distribution(SD) Benchmark

Sun and SAP have achieved a world record for one processor server First SAP Sales and Distribution(SD) Benchmark with more than 10000 SAPS per processor (10850 SAPS / 2135 SD User). SAP reached an almost perfect scaling with the move from T1 to T2. With the SAP SD benchmark we reached 1100 SD User with a T1 and 2135 User with a T2. Therefore the *scaling* is *1.94

* With this new benchmark SAP customers can rest assured that they will get the most power for their investment. Sun T2000 systems run the most complex and demanding SAP applications and provide the highest performing systems for performance hungry SAP environments. SAP customers will get more performance per server, resulting in increased productivity with less cost, especially less total cost of ownership, and less complexity. At the same time, they can run more users on one machine, which enables large, complex SAP IT environments to run on innovative Sun servers*

* This shows Sun is a market leader and an innovative company customers can trust and their buying decision in Sun is a safe one.

*Note on: SD Benchmarks
SAP Standard Application Benchmarks test the hardware and database performance of SAP applications and components. Access the two-tier and three-tier results for the Sales and Distribution (SD) Benchmark

Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal held a couple of events this week at the Sofitel Hotel in Redwood City, Calif.  Jonathan Schwartz and David Yen were key participants.   

Last night The WSJ gave out its annual Technology Innovation Awards.  Jonathan was the keynote  speaker, which makes sense because Sun is the only two-time winner of the top “Gold” category (Proximity Interconnect, 2004; DTrace, 2006). 

Sun didn’t win this year, but according to Jonathan,  “Innovation is Sun’s lifeblood.  We invest $2 billion a year in R&D.”  It is through innovation that Sun grows its business.  And it is through innovation that we’re helping to make a difference in the world.

Then this morning Ken Anderson, editorial director at Dow Jones, interviewed David Yen onstage at the Dow Jones VentureWires Microventures forum. 

The audience was made-up of start-up companies and venture capitalists.  Yen touched on Sun creating the standalone Sun Microelectronics group, how Sun was able to lead the way with chip multithreading, Sun’s commitment to developing eco-efficient processors, and Sun’s OpenSPARC program.