BALTIMORE - SUPERCOMPUTING 2002 -- Expanding its commitment to the high performance technical computing (HPTC) market, Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: SUNW) today announced the early access program for the beta release of Sun HPC ClusterTools(TM) 5 software. Designed specifically for compute-intensive, high-performance, technical computing environments, Sun's powerful HPC ClusterTools 5 software provides a tightly integrated toolset to manage a workload of resource-intensive applications and delivers an end-to-end software development environment for parallel distributed applications. Building on the capabilities currently available in Sun's HPC ClusterTools solutions, the new software delivers scalability up to 2048 processes and 256 nodes, a four-fold increase over previous versions. Sun HPC ClusterTools 5 software supports a variety of interconnects, including Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet, Myrinet 2000 as well as Sun's new Sun Fire Link interconnect technology (see related press release at http://sun.com/press/presskits/supercomputing2002/ ). With Myrinet 2000 and Sun Fire Link interconnects, Sun HPC ClusterTools software bypasses the TCP/IP stack to support low-latency communication among nodes in a cluster. In addition, the Sun HPC ClusterTools 5 technology provides a complete software development environment for analyzing, debugging and monitoring of industry standard Message Passing Interface (MPI) applications on Sun symmetric-multiprocessor (SMP) systems and clusters. The software is also thread-safe and shared-memory aware, delivering increased efficiency in support of highly scalable message passing applications. The software now also features integration with Sun's robust solution for grid computing -- Sun(TM) ONE Grid Engine software. The early access version of Sun HPC ClusterTools 5 software is available for free download at http://www.sun.com/servers/hpc/software/tryandbuy.html . "Adding Sun ClusterTools 5 software to our robust portfolio of HPTC solutions, Sun is reinforcing its commitment to innovation in the high-performance technical computing market," said Stephen Perrenod, group manager, High Performance and Technical Computing Marketing, Sun Microsystems. "Delivering massive scalability up to 256 nodes and 2048 processes and integrating full support for the industry standard MPI-2 offers our users the ability to scale their applications transparently from desktops to Teraflops." Through the early access program, Sun will work closely with leading software vendors and customers to optimize the new clustering solution. The early access program, part of Sun's rigorous quality assurance and product certification process, helps to ensure that new products are optimized for production-use. For a demonstration of Sun HPC ClusterTools 5 software, please visit Sun's booth #1709 at Supercomputing 2002. Availability Sun HPC ClusterTools solutions, including the beta release of Sun HPC ClusterTools 5 software, are available for free download and unlimited use at: http://www.sun.com/software/hpc . The complete source code for Sun HPC ClusterTools 5 beta software is also immediately available to the high-performance solutions development community under the Sun Community Source Code License (SCSL) program.