Monday Jan 05, 2009
It's amazing what gets done when people (and institutions) work together. A good example is the innovation that comes out the collaborative efforts that Sun formalizes with academic institutions through the Center of Excellence Program (COE). Here are some good examples:
- Saint Paul College COE for next-generation immersive learning systems based on Project Wonderland. Check out Kevin's blog for info on the upcoming COE launch event;
- The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi Centre of Excellence
in E-governance which is conducting research to advance the eGovernance field to contribute to better social infrastructure, provide enhanced security and a better quality of life for the citizens of India; and
- The growing community of COEs adopting OpenSPARC to execute chip design research
and course work based on Sun's chip multi-threading (CMT) design.
Of course, there are many more outstanding collaborative efforts underway in a variety of fields.
Thursday Nov 20, 2008
One of the great things about open source technologies and communities is the transparency associated with development and release cycles. So the release of NetBeans 6.5 does not come as a surprise. Yet, it's still fun to proclaim that NetBeans 6.5 has been officially released and is available for download.
NetBeans IDE 6.5 offers simplified and rapid development of web, enterprise, desktop, and mobile applications with PHP, JavaScript, Java, C/C++, Ruby, and Groovy. Here's a summary of the new features in NB 6.5:
- Robust support for PHP and JavaScript
- Debugging for Firefox and IE
- Support for Groovy and Grails
- New enhancements for Java™, Ruby and Rails, and C/C++ development
- Built-in support for Hibernate, Eclipse project import, and compile on save
If you're new to NetBeans, you'll also appreciate the IDE editing capabilities and the famous Swing GUI Builder (Matisse).
Here are some good resources for you to learn about NetBeans IDE 6.5:
Students will love all the time-saving features that will make coding your class projects so much easier. Have fun with NetBeans 6.5.
Download NetBeans IDE 6.5
Tuesday Nov 18, 2008
I want to share with you that Sun recently announced EduConnection.org, a social networking site for IT professionals in education. If you're interested in a short audio explaining more about it, you can check out this audio segment on Sun News Radio.
Designed as a neutral forum to connect and empower the global education community, EduConnection.org serves Sun’s education sector partners and customers. Focusing on Sun’s education customer community, including the more than 38,000 subscribers to Sun's Educonnection newsletter, Educonnection.org offers a platform for schools to exchange information and best practices that will help them to mitigate the challenges of purchasing and implementing new technology in an era of increasing budgetary pressure. It also provides another opportunity for Sun to directly energize, engage and support the education community.
We're shifting the conversation so community members can select the content they want, define useful content via connections with other members, contribute articles, linked blogs, videos, podcasts and more.
Share this as well with your instructors, your on-campus IT staff, and your administrators that joining will give them access to valuable Education industry content and conversations, whether they contribute or read.
Take a look around, sign up and participate. Join the Conversation.
Monday Nov 17, 2008
The latest Sun Studio Express release with updated features and enhancements is now available for download. Sun Studio Software delivers a high-performance, optimizing C/C++/Fortran developer toolchain for Solaris, OpenSolaris, and Linux OSs, including support for multicore x86- and SPARC-based systems. The toolchain includes parallelizing compilers, code-level and memory debuggers, and performance and thread analysis tools. With a NetBeans-based IDE developing parallel applications for the mutlicore era has never been easier!
Sun Studio is supported on OpenSolaris 2008.05, Solaris 10 and Linux (RHEL 5/SuSe 10/Ubuntu 8.04/CentOS 5.1)
Download a free unrestricted copy today!
If you register your Sun Studio installation, you will also receive access to the following content:
- Sample chapter from the book Solaris Application Programming by Darryl Gove titled, "Correctness and Debug"
- Guide to selecting the best compiler options
- Booklet on using Sun Studio to develop parallel applications
For more information on this latest release of Sun Studio Express join Ikroop Dhillon, Product Marketing Manager for Sun Studio and Vijay Tatkar,Senior Engineering Manager in the Developer Tools Organization, both with Sun Microsystems, as they discuss the feature highlights of Sun Studio Express 11/08.
Listen to the podcast.
Friday Nov 14, 2008
If you are a student, professor or researcher and haven't heard of Sun SPOTs, you've been missing out.
Sun SPOTs are small, wireless, battery powered devices (a platform really) that include built-in sensors that can easily interface to
external devices. Here's what makes Sun SPOTs extra cool. They are programmed in Java. This means that programming for embedded systems is no longer limited to low level programming languages. But it just gets better. The entire SunSPOT technology stack (SW & HW) is completely open source. This opens up tremendous new possibilities to enhance curriculum, instruction and research.
Project Sun SPOT was developed by the smart researchers at Sun Labs as one of the foundation technologies that will enable the "Internet Of Things" in which everything with an electronic pulse (cars, appliances, etc.) can be connected over the Internet. Think of this as the ultimate realization of Sun's vision that the network is the computer.
In fact, Time Magazine just recognized The Internet Of Things as one of their Best Inventions of 2008. For ultimate Geek appeal, however, it's hard to beat the recognition bestowed upon Sun SPOT as the InfoWorld #1 Must Have Gadget for the Discerning Geek.
Sun SPOT World has all the info you need including a good resource for getting started and info on special discounted pricing for education.
Monday Nov 10, 2008
Most everyone has heard of Sun's support for Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) by now. But can you open source hardware? Well, that's exactly what Sun has done with OpenSPARC. Perhaps a bit more background is in order.
Through the OpenSPARC Community, Sun has made the hardware source code of the UltraSPARC T1 & T2 processors available under an Open Source license. The code along with the development tools which are available through the OpenSPARC community, provide the essential components to develop a new chip. Of course, what makes this all really interesting is that OpenSPARC represents the bleeding edge of multi-core, multi-threaded chip architecture or CMT as we say at Sun.
So what does all this have to do with college professors? Well...alot. To understand why, it's appropriate to reflect on the quote by that famous professor of computer architecture who said "I skate to where the puck is going to be,..."
We all know that this quote is really by Wayne Gretzky, but here is why the quote applies to chip architecture. If you are a professor, you want your courses to be relevant today, while you are teaching them and still be relevant for your students once they graduate. Multi-core, mult-threaded architectures are not only the current state-of-the-art, but the future as well.
Professors have their choice of chip platforms to include in their curricula. But, why not select the platform packing the most cores and threads and one that integrates all the key functions of a server on a
single chip? If you combine the benefits of an open source platform with the technical benefits, OpenSPARC is a compelling choice. So to once again paraphrase the Great One, professors selecting OpenSPARC as an instructional platform are "skating to where the puck is going to be"
In Europe, universities and professors can now benefit from a new collaborative relationship between Sun and Europractice, a European Union-backed non-profit microelectronics design stimulation project. This new collaboration is designed to cultivate Europe's future engineering talent and provide researchers, professors and students with an end-to-end solution to help create next-generation multithreaded microprocessors. Sun and Europractice will work together to promote curriculum adoption beginning with a series of OpenSPARC technology workshops this autumn. Professors attending the workshops will then be able to incorporate OpenSPARC in their courses.
Another helpful resource are the OpenSPARC Slidecasts consisting of 12 modules which participants through the process of developing their own OpenSPARC designs. The twelve chapters cover the different aspects of OpenSPARC and together are equivalent to a 2 day technical OpenSPARC workshop.
Also take advantage of the free download of the newly published OpenSPARC Internals, edited by David Weaver. Register and download a free PDF copy.
And, here's something for all you SW developers. We need software optimized to leverage the benefits of multi-core, multi-threaded architectures. A great resource is the White Paper: Multithreaded Application Acceleration with Chip Multithreading (CMT).
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