Sun has posted dramatic growth on this year's "TOP500" supercomputers
list with 88 customer entries, up from 37 on this year's June list.
While IBM and Hewlett-Packard lost more than 30 systems each on the new
list, Sun more than doubled its presence, surpassing SGI and moving up
from fourth position to third.
At the Fall COMDEX 2002 conference, Sun chairman, president and CEO Scott McNealy addressed the growing
complexity in computing today and how to solve it. McNealy stated a new
era of computing is here, one in which everything digital is connected.
Previous eras were the client-to-client decade
and the Internet decade.
Financial institution UBS Switzerland is connecting to SWIFTNet,
a cutting-edge technology in the financial services industry that is
geared toward improving market efficiency and reducing risk. UBS is
working with Sun on its migration project which is being carried out in
three phases.
Kirchman Corporation of Florida, a developer of banking software
solutions, decided last year to port its mainframe-based system to
the Solaris Operating Environment (Solaris OE). Kirchman
president Rachel Landrum describes the move in an article appearing in
the winter edition of OpenFinance magazine.
The mobile portal solution from Sun, Nextel Communications and EDS
securely extends functionality of the Sun Open Net Environment (Sun
ONE) to Java technology-enabled Nextel handsets and
wirelessly-enabled devices. With it, employees, customers and partners
have a personalized, customizable interface for company information,
applications and services.
Sun introduced expanded services, training and industry-specific
solutions for grid computing at Sun's recent EMEA iForce Volume
Partners Conference in Barcelona. The program rolls out immediately
across the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region. The Grid
Computing Solutions Program provides a deployment and services structure
that helps customers implement grid solutions, while reducing the cost,
risk and complexity associated with these implementations.
Mobile solutions can literally accompany healthcare professionals in
the performance of their jobs, whether the professional works in care
delivery or in the back office. Handheld, wireless applications, such as those
made possible with Java technology, can enable doctors and nurses to gain
ready access to complete patient treatment histories and gain access
to the right information at the right time to prescribe the right treatments.
The winter 2002 issue of OpenFinance magazine includes an interview with Sir
George Mathewson, chairman, Royal Bank of Scotland Group. Editor Jane
Ure Smith reports on the evolving concept of the branch and
modernizing its technology. Also covered in the magazine is the BAI's
Retail Delivery conference 2002 and other topics.
Sun is offering an early access program for the beta
release of Sun HPC ClusterTools 5 software for the high-performance
technical computing market. The new software delivers scalability up to
2,048 processes and 256 nodes, a four-fold increase over previous
versions. It supports a variety of interconnects, including the new Sun
Fire Link interconnect technology.
Sun has premiered its new Sun Fire Link interconnect that supports
an industry-leading 4.8 Gbytes/second peak throughput and peak
performance of more than a teraflop -- one trillion floating-point
operations per second -- in a cluster of systems. The
optical interconnect technology dramatically accelerates cluster
communication among up to eight high-end Sun systems powering up to 800
processors.
Sun's new Capacity on Demand 2.0 (COD) is an enhanced "pay-as-you-go"
computing option that allows customers to upgrade Sun Fire
midframe and high-end systems one processor at a time when user demands
increase. Sun customers can take advantage of COD 2.0 at no extra
cost -- paying only for the resources when they're
used -- and without having to report or monitor upgrades.
Sun is bringing its Life Sciences Best Practices Series to Philadelphia
on December 9, Princeton, New Jersey on December 10 and Cambridge,
Massachusetts
on December 12. Researchers in life sciences can hear about scientific
and IT best practices, along with
emerging strategies to assemble, manage and analyze their discovery
data.
The Wireless Java technology training course on Java 2
Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME) will be held Thursday, December 5,
2002, in Hong Kong, at the Novotel Century Hotel. The registration
deadline is November 25.
The EJK Life Science Expo and conference program taking place December
4 and 5 in Baltimore includes the Sun-sponsored BioGrids Conference
portion. BioGrids explores the challenges of computational biology
solutions, including grids, clusters, shared computing and
supercomputing. Speakers include Sun's Howard Asher, director of global
life sciences and Dr. Wolfgang Gentzsch, Sun's senior director of grid
computing.
Sun is a sponsor of the National Retail Federation's (NRF) 92nd
Annual Convention to be held January 12-15, 2003, in the
Jacob Javits Convention Center, New York City.
Sun Fire Link hardware is a high-performance cluster interconnect
targeted to the upper end of the UltraSPARC III processor-based
servers, specifically the Sun Fire 6800 server, Sun Fire 12K
server and Sun Fire 15K server. The high data rate and low latency
of a Sun Fire Link hardware interconnect will benefit the performance
of clustered applications.
Sun Microsystems has announced new CPU/Memory board (Uniboard)
configurations with the new high-performance 1.05-GHz/8 MB
UltraSPARC III Cu processors for the Sun Fire 3800, 4800, 4810,
6800, 12K and 15K servers. The new Uniboards are shared across the
product line, thereby increasing the vertical scalability from Sun Fire
3800 server to Sun Fire 15K server.
With High Availability Service Packs from Sun, downtime can be
proactively addressed before they affect business operations.
Each pack combines field-tested consulting, training and support services to deliver
end-to-end support and expertise at every phase of the application life
cycle.
The Netra CT 410 and CT 810 servers are CompactPCI (CPCI) network
servers that meet and often exceed telecommunications requirements in a
commercial, off-the-shelf platform. The principal difference between
the servers is that the Netra CT 410 carries two 6U CompactPCI slots while
the Netra CT 810 offers exceptional I/O density with six CPCI slots.
Sun has packed its Sun LX50 server VPN/Firewall appliance with
"Secured by Check Point" software. With Check Point VPN-1/FireWall-1
software pre-installed, a hardened operating system and a user-centric
GUI -- all right out of the box -- the appliance offers security,
one-step creation of virtual private networks (VPN) and central
security management.
The Sun Fire V120 server is now supported with Sun Cluster 3.0
software in the SunPlex platform environment. When a Sun Fire V120
server is configured in a SunPlex platform environment, the Sun Fire
V120 server can be used to manage the service levels of the application
services.
The Volume Server group at Sun will transition off the Sun price list
the Sun Fire V480 server with four 900-MHz UltraSPARC III
processors and 32 GB of memory. Also being transitioned is the
server/storage bundle that includes the four-processor Sun Fire V480
server with 32 GB of memory and the Sun StorEdge T3 array with nine
73-GB drives.
PatchPro from the SunSolve Online program simplifies the system
administration task of patch management for customers using Sun storage
products. The new release of PatchPro Interactive analyzes your
system configuration and suggests repairs.
Sun has introduced the Sun StorEdge Configuration Service 1.0 L10N
version that provides configuration service in English, Japanese,
French, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese languages.
With this version, Sun announced the end-of-life of the previous
version of Sun StorEdge Configuration Service 1.0.
The 16-port Channel Host Adapter (CHA) further extends the connectivity
choices for the Sun StorEdge 9980 and the Sun StorEdge 9970
systems and encourages greater storage consolidation. It supports greater
SAN connectivity and reduces the per-port cost by approximately 17 percent
(based on US list price) compared to the current eight-port CHA.
Sun is offering a promotion for education and research institutions
worldwide for the Sun LX50 server. This server is a dual Pentium
III processor-based 1U rack-mountable server with Sun Linux Version 5.0
and Linux-based Sun Open Net Environment (Sun ONE) applications
pre-installed. The promotion is good until March 28, 2003.
Sun is offering education and research institutions a promotion on the
Sun Blade 2000 workstation configurations based on 2 x 1.015 GHz
UltraSPARC III Cu CPU. These configurations and their increased
performance are being offered at the same price point as the previously
announced systems based on 900-MHz UltraSPARC III Cu CPU.
The PGX32 Graphics Accelerator promotion is designed for
professionals and education researchers who need fast X Window system
performance that displays 24-bit and 8-bit graphics at full speed.
A per-client right-to-use (RTU) license for Sun Ray server software
1.3 may now be purchased in packs of 20 for research and education
customers only. The software license is no longer restricted to any one
server.
Tom Gould's article, "Setting Up Solaris 7, 8 and 9 Operating
Environment for Java Servlet Graphics" outlines how a server
system can be set up with the Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition
(J2SE) SDK and the X Window system. It also provides information on
programming servlets to create images or installing a servlet
engine like Tomcat.
An article, "High-level Network Programming" by Qusay H. Mahmoud
focuses on how to develop HTTP-based applications using the high-level
application programming interfaces of the java.net package. The java.net
package contains the classes and interfaces that provide both low- and
high-level APIs for network programming. The high-level APIs allow
faster development of network applications.
The Java 2 Platform Resource Center Web site has been created for
Visual Basic developers who are looking to add the Java programming
language to their existing set of programming skills. Visual Basic
developers will find a platform development tool, tutorials and evaluation
versions of deployment software.
SAS launched two new solutions at the Bio-IT World Conference to help
pharmaceutical companies get new medications to market faster: SAS
Scientific Discovery Solutions and SAS Drug Development 2.0. SAS has
worked closely with Sun Microsystems to develop SAS Scientific
Discovery Solutions and SAS Drug Development for the open, robust Sun
platform.
Newly released Ximian Evolution version 1.2 offers a host of
enhancements designed to improve the usability, performance and interoperability of
the personal and workgroup information management solution for Linux
and UNIX-based systems. Version 1.2 of Ximian Inc.'s solution
upgrades its integrated email, calendar, contact and task-list
management functions.
Ximian Inc. has released version 1.2 of its Ximian Connector for
Microsoft Exchange software, which allows Linux and UNIX system users of
the Ximian Evolution groupware suite to manage personal information and
collaborate with Windows-based co-workers using Microsoft Exchange
2000. Ximian Connector now supports advanced Exchange features such as
public folders, calendar delegation and direct resource booking.
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