Sun has signed a collaborative agreement with the University of Tokyo for two projects involving the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology. One project will seek to develop a library based on skeletal parallel programming in Fortress, which is expected to significantly enhance the convenience of parallel programming. The second project has the aim of implementing an MVM environment, which is expected to make Ruby programs run more efficiently, on both Ruby and JRuby. The results of the first project will be disclosed under an OSI-approved license, and the results of the second are scheduled to be open sourced via the broader community of Ruby developers, which could inspire further innovations.

"We are delighted to be backing the work at the University of Tokyo," said Jim Parkinson, Sun's vice president of Developer, Tools and Services. "We expect this research to help enable a quantum leap in the scaling abilities of modern Web frameworks like Ruby on Rails."

Koichi Yamada, managing director of the University of Tokyo, added, "We are very pleased to announce the commencement of two research projects with Sun Microsystems. We believe our close relationship can create knowledge contributing to both industrial and academic fields."

The research on Fortress is scheduled to continue until the end of March 2009. For the first year, Sun will contribute funding to the research, which will be conducted at Sun Labs and the University of Tokyo. The university will hire a postdoctoral researcher to conduct the research. A multiple virtual machine (MVM) environment on Ruby and JRuby is expected to enable greater application performance.

The research on the Ruby programs is designed to address the issue created by the instance of running more than one application simultaneously on Ruby, which currently requires multiple interpreters, resulting in excessive memory consumption. The MVM environment proposed by the University of Tokyo-Sun collaboration could generate multiple VM instances on a single interpreter that allows applications to run more efficiently. The project seeks to clarify such technical issues as the definition of common interfaces for using MVM and parallelization of VM instances and memory sharing, with the hope of implementing these technologies for use on Ruby and JRuby.

The collaborative research on the Ruby programs is scheduled to continue until the end of September 2009. For the first year, Sun will contribute funding to the research. In addition to the principal researchers from Sun's JRuby team and the University of Tokyo, various other researchers and programmers will be invited to join in this research.

This collaboration represents the first time a Japanese institution has engaged in an arrangement with a foreign firm under the terms of Proprius21, a scheme whose purpose is to produce results from collaborations between Japanese academia and private enterprise. While this is the first such venture, if Sun's plans come to fruition, it will not be the last. "We'll be exploring the possibility of conducting joint R&D into next-generation technologies in the fields of digital campuses, e-learning, and computer sciences," says Emil Sarpa, director of Sun's External Research Office. "Everyone will benefit." [...read more...]

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