Sun Microsystems Makes HPC Software Development Tools Available On Web

Sun Microsystems Inc. (Palo Alto, CA) will make its Sun HPC ClusterTools software available on the Web by the end of the year through its recently introduced Sun Community Source Licensing (SCSL) model. Sun will be the first vendor of high-performance computing (HPC) systems to offer community access to its core HPC software development tools, which the company believes will lead to innovative advances in HPC software applications.

The Sun HPC ClusterTools software enables HPC developers to create the numerically intensive supercomputing applications that are used in research laboratories, government institutions, universities, and corporations worldwide. These tools are specifically designed to allow the development of scalable, high-performance applications on Sun platforms using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) distributed memory programming paradigm, which is standard for many HPC applications.

By making the source code available at no cost via the Web, Sun is empowering members of the HPC community to fine-tune the software for their specific applications. Many developers will then choose to post their modifications to the Web site, sharing enhancements with the greater HPC development community. Developers will also be able to adapt the Sun HPC ClusterTools software for use on other platforms, enabling better interoperability of their applications in multi-platform customer sites.

The components of Sun HPC ClusterTools software that are slated for Web availability include the Sun MPI Library, the Prism parallel programming environment, the Sun PFS (Sun Parallel File System), the Scalable Scientific Subroutine Library (S3L), and the Cluster Runtime Environment (CRE).

Sun will offer three different levels of license agreements to developers who want access to the Sun HPC ClusterTools source code: research use, internal deployment, and commercial use. Terms of the licensing agreements vary.

Sun Microsystems Inc. is a provider of hardware, software, and services for establishing enterprise-wide intranets and expanding the power of the Internet.

For more information, call Andrea Fleming of Sun Microsystems at 650-786-8075, or e-mail andrea.fleming@sun.com.