For cutting-edge Sun Labs projects, be sure to watch a short video by Steve Heller, senior research director of Sun Labs & ERO. During his presentation, Heller discusses various new projects, including Fortress and Project Wonderland. He discusses Sun SPOT, a project of interest, and offers advice for students breaking into the IT field.

Fortress is a new programming language that could potentially provide new possibilities for scalable computing and high-performance computing (HPC). Heller explained that Fortress is a high-level, mathematical-based language that helps to make programming much easier with sequentialized behavior for the program.

"Project Wonderland is a three-dimensional virtual world system where students can build their own world. It is an open-source system written in Java," Heller said. He described Project Wonderland as an engaging and exciting Open Source project that allows users to bring in other applications written in Java and collaborate them together in their own world. Users may then unite these projects with users around the world in an Open Source forum.

Another exciting, favorite project of Heller's at Sun Labs is Sun SPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology), a small, battery operated, wireless device for sensing and detecting that is getting students around the world involved. In some projects, students are using this device to conduct environmental research. The Sun SPOT device runs on the Squawk Java Virtual Machine (VM) without an underlying OS.

Heller's message for students entailed an encouragement to get involved in large open source projects to learn how to engage and participate as a member of the community. With this member experience, students may learn how to be a valuable employee and take their book knowledge to the next level.

About Fortress

Made up two parts, Fortress is: 1) Paralleled by default. Users must mark sections of code that are to be treated sequentially. 2) Language that is made up of math formulas. This mathematical notation is easily understood by developers and non-developers alike. In addition, the details of communication and data partitioning are easy to build. The Fortress formula allows users to execute a program that is running on large-scale parallel machines.

More Information

Video: Steve Heller on exciting new projects from Sun Labs

Sun Labs Research Projects

Project Fortress

Collaborative Environment

Get your hands on Project Sun SPOT

News Bites: Project Wonderland

Sun Labs Open House Shows Off Current Research Projects

Sun, University of Tokyo Sign Agreement for Collaborative Research [...read more...]

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