ACADEMIA

Sun celebrated its commitment to accelerating innovation and R&D with its annual Sun Labs Open House on Friday, June 2nd. This year's event honored Sun Labs' 15th anniversary and featured many of Sun's top thinkers, engineers and innovators -- including keynotes from Sun Labs Director Bob Sproull and Sun CTO and EVP of Research and Development, Greg Papadopoulos. Nearly all of Sun's cutting edge technologies under development were on display -- everything ranging from next-generation Java applications, to Project Sun SPOT (Java programmable wireless sensors) to advanced music search. The event featured talks by 12 of Sun's leading research scientists and 40 technology demonstrations. Attendees got an inside look at the disruptive technologies that traditionally don't show up on the company's regular product roadmaps. "Sun's unique competitive advantage and technological edge are based on our ability to innovate, and deploy those innovations. Over the past four years alone, Sun has invested $8 billion in R&D, and Sun Labs, the only organization within Sun devoted solely to applied research, is an essential component to our overall R&D strategy," said Greg Papadopoulos, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Research and Development, Sun Microsystems. "The advances that have come from Sun Labs address the things no one else saw coming -- from Java technologies to Sun Ray thin clients -- technologies that have the power to change everything as we build the Participation Age." Established in 1991, Sun Labs' charter is to pioneer advanced technologies that solve difficult problems for customers and transfer the technology to Sun's core product units. Sun Labs plays an important role in Sun's R&D portfolio, looking to break barriers and develop new technologies in computing, storage, entertainment and software. Some of Sun's most successful technologies and products originated from Sun Labs, including Java technology, UltraSPARC III, Sun Ray and much more. "Fifteen years ago, we founded Sun Labs with two main missions -- solving our customers' most technical problems and asking a few hard, unthinkable questions. The way we've been able to do this is by having some of the best researchers in the world and by having a constant influx of new ideas," said Bob Sproull, VP, Sun Fellow and Director of Sun Labs. "Our most effective technology transfers involve engineers from the business units throughout our research, and culminate in transferring our researchers to the business unit, along with their ideas and artifacts. Ultimately, this model has proven extremely effective and has been critical in helping Sun maintain its innovative edge." Projects on display at the 15th Anniversary Sun Labs Open House included: o Sun SPOTs with Advanced Pattern Recognition for Manufacturing QA: The system couples Project Sun SPOT wireless intelligent motes with advanced pattern recognition that has been developed as part of Sun's Continuous System Telemetry Harness (CSTH) methodology to monitor the health of the quality testing of computing products. o Fortress Programming Language: Developed as part of the DARPA HPCS Phase II exploration at Sun Labs, Fortress is a general-purpose, statically typed, component-based programming language designed for producing robust high-performance software with high programmer productivity. o Neuromancer: An investigation into the infrastructure needed for large scale telemetry networks that could help health officials spot disturbing trends before they become pandemics. o Project Darkstar: This game server technology solves many of the hard distributed computing problems associated with modern online gaming and provides game developers with a simple platform where they can focus on server-side logic and on actual game development (characters, storyline, back-drops).