Sun has been awarded a 12-month contract by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program to assess and develop technology solutions to address future Department of Defense (DoD) high-performance requirements. The contract has three phases; contracts for the other phases have not been awarded yet.

The goal of the HPCS program is to provide the next generation of high productivity computing systems, both hardware and software, to address future DoD high-performance requirements in a number of critical areas, including: weather and ocean forecasting; analysis of circulation patterns and the dispersal of airborne vectors; cryptanalysis; weapons, survivability and stealth design; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; virtual manufacturing and failure analysis; emerging biotechnology.

Sun's program for Phase I of the HPCS Program is led by a team of Sun Microsystems Laboratories scientists and Sun Distinguished Engineers who will work in collaboration with scientists from the Information Science Institute at the University of Southern California. The Sun program will address both productivity and performance. Sun proposes a JavaTM technology-oriented approach to these two issues. Sun will be conducting programming language research so that the same improvements already made in programmer productivity in other application areas can be realized by those working on large computational problems. Language extensions for arrays, interval arithmetic and complex arithmetic, together with optimized programming libraries, will allow scientists such as astronomers and biologists to realize the same productivity gains already achieved in so many Web-related application areas.

"The Java programming language and JavaTM Virtual Machine (JVMTM) together with the Java HotSpotTM compiler have demonstrated that, for certain application areas, the executed code can be more efficient than using traditional programming languages. A similar efficiency may be realized for large computational problems," said James Gosling, Sun Fellow and researcher, Sun Labs. "Because of the semantics of the Java programming language, program analysis and compiler technologies will lead to more efficient data movement and thread management. An even greater level of performance might also be achieved if the machine design supports the program analysis and compiler technologies."

For more information, visit:

http://www.darpa.mil/ipto/research/hpcs

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