ACADEMIA

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:SUNW) , today announced that Dr. Jim Mitchell, Sun Fellow and Vice President of Sun Microsystems Laboratories will lead Sun's High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) Research and Development Program. Funded in part by the recent three-year $50 million grant from DARPA, the HPCS research program will explore novel approaches to the hardware and software total system design leading to the next generation of supercomputers. "The HPCS Program is vital to Sun, so we decided to put top talent in position to run it," says Scott McNealy, President, Chairman and CEO, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "Jim's extensive background in research and in hardware and software development makes him the best choice for the job. As a systems company, Sun is executing on its vision of everyone and everything connected to the network through its innovative contributions to the DARPA project." Jim joined Sun in 1988, managing the Spring distributed, object-oriented operating system research in Sun Labs and SunSoft. As Java(TM) technology took off, Jim became VP of Technology and Architecture in the Java Software Division, then Chief Technology Officer, Java Consumer & Embedded. Elected Sun Fellow in 1992, for the past three years, Jim has served as VP and director of Sun Labs. Dr. Mitchell will lead a "dream team" of innovators from Sun's research and development organizations, including some of Sun's most senior, accomplished researchers and engineers. "I am completely jazzed by the opportunity to push the state of the art in supercomputing systems," says Jim Mitchell, VP, HPCS R&D Program. "This phase of the DARPA HPCS program will attack a number of challenging research questions. The hardware and software technologies we are pursuing will impact many of our future products by giving Sun strategic capabilities beyond what we and other companies have today. We are assembling an incredibly talented and skilled team to carry out this research, and I am privileged to work with them on this exciting program." Sun's HPCS program will develop and apply new technologies in early modeling and analysis of system architectures against real technical workloads, in the execution models for HPCS software applications, and in the scalability and reliability of the hardware and software for systems capable of a million billion calculations per second. All of the technologies being researched are applicable across Sun's product lines as well as forming the basis for a supercomputer. Sun and its customers will benefit from the research broadly, not just within the confines of a supercomputer systems, but also in software functionality and reliability, storage performance and scalability, total system performance, and human productivity in developing software applications.