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UPPSALA, SWEDEN -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq:SUNW) announced that it has selected Uppsala University (UU), Department of Information Technology, Sweden, as a Sun Center of Excellence (COE) in high-performance computing architecture to assault new challenges in scientific computing. This new Sun COE joins a worldwide network of academic institutions developing advanced technology to do groundbreaking research - to the benefit of both academia and industry. The UU Center of Excellence will design and explore new and innovative hardware and software architectures for high-end server systems and for potential deployment into future high-performance computing systems. The UU COE will assist researchers, scientists, and engineers in programming of modern parallel high-performance computing architectures, and also introduce future generations of students to said discipline. The announcement was made at the inauguration of Uppsala University's new high-performance computing resource, a Sun Fire[TM] 15K from Sun Microsystems. This new system, which Uppsala University was the first academic institution to order in North Europe, brings access to a combination of high processing power coupled with a state-of-the-art systems architecture providing researchers a unique environment for implementation of parallel computing algorithms. The Sun Fire 15K is a first step in the formation of a major computing resource at Uppsala University and has been made possible by a significant grant to the Department of Scientific Computing from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, and matching contributions from Sun's Global Education & Research branch, as part of the global COE program. Uppsala University, Dept. of Information Technology, brings expertise in the area of research and education in development of methods targetting solving of large-scale computing problems within engineering sciences and natural sciences, and has recently made major investments in the area of computer architecture for high-performance computing. The new system will also have a direct impact on the research work undertaken between Swedish industry and academia in the Parallel and Scientific Computing Institute (PSCI) which Sun Microsystems joined in year 2000. PSCI is a Swedish national competence center and a joint collaboration between the Swedish Agency for Innovation Systems/Vinnova, the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Uppsala University, and Swedish compute intensive industry. "Sun's commitment to support the education and research sector and to achieve results through data and numerical intensive-computing is exemplified through our chosen COEs" said Kim Jones, vice president of global education and research for Sun Microsystems. "We have been having a successful engineering collaboration project for several years with PSCI and Professor Erik Hagersten's research team on computer architecture at Uppsala University. We're proud that UU/IT now is part of the Sun COE network". Sun's worldwide Centers of Excellence program promotes collaboration to help build new technologies and communities that advance academic research. Additional Sun COEs are focused on high-performance computing, bioinformatics, geoscience, computational fluid dynamics, e-learning, digital libraries, business incubation, and administrative computing For more information visit www.sun.com/edu