SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced that six employees will receive the company's highest technical honor in engineering -- the appointment to Sun Fellow. This prestigious Fellowship, held by only six others company wide, has been awarded to Nick Aneshansley, Whitfield Diffie, Graham Hamilton, Les Kohn, Guy Steele, and Marc Tremblay for their work in the areas of software, systems and security -- critical components of Sun's Network Computing vision. The award represents the highest level of excellence in this field and is the most senior role that can be attained within Sun's engineering leadership. "Innovation is only partly about technology. The bigger part is the people who have the insights, make the connections, and spur each other to new heights," said Greg Papadopoulos, executive vice president and chief technology officer, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "It has always been the people of Sun that produce not just big ideas but big results. This is an elite group of experts in their fields who understand how to create and apply technology to provide real-life solutions to our customers worldwide as networks grow more complex." Sun's organization offers a dual ladder structure, providing equal advancement opportunities for people in the technical and management disciplines. The company created the rank of Fellow in 1991 and looks to its Fellows to help guide its technical development, identify new technical opportunities, and advise management on technical issues. The six new Fellows join the most senior ranks of Sun's engineering leadership with Rob Gingell, James Gosling, Jim Mitchell, Mike Splain, Ivan Sutherland, and Bob Sproull. 2003 Sun Fellows and Their Impact on Sun's Vision As more devices and systems connect to the network there is an increasing need for a watershed in systems design to handle information flow with radically higher-scale microprocessors, exabytes of storage, terabits of bandwidth and billions of IP connections -- all of which have security implications. The combined efforts of this group of new Sun Fellows is driving this change through innovations in: processor design known as Throughput Computing; radical new approaches to software design, development, and delivery; and anticipating and addressing future customer security requirements. Nick Aneshansley joined Sun in 1996 through Sun's acquisition of Cray's technology, which included a high-end product popularly known as "Starfire(TM)." Aneshansley was the Chief Architect for this scalable 64-way SMP system, which became the Sun Enterprise(TM) 10000 server. The system changed the data center as we know it today and helped enable customers to consolidate applications onto a single, large-capacity server, leading to lower costs and more efficient system management. Whitfield Diffie, a globally-recognized expert on cryptography and security technology, joined Sun in 1991 and now serves as Sun's Chief Security Officer. Diffie was one of the driving forces in the policy struggle that has led to legal recognition for the importance of advanced security technologies for modern society. Diffie is also recognized as the inventor of the Public Key Encryption concept that underlies secure electronic commerce and is respected in security and intelligence circles worldwide as an authority on information technology security issues. Whitfield is honored for his superior technical achievements and his advocacy for strong security industry-wide. Graham Hamilton has been instrumental in the development of the Java(TM) platform since joining Sun in 1989. Hamilton has become Java technology's persistent presence and conscience as it has transitioned from novel technology to industry presence. He has made countless contributions including the Java(TM) IDL system, the JDBC(TM) database access API, the JavaBeans(TM) component initiative, and most recently Java technology's APIs for XML. He has also contributed to Java technology through developer and market adoption strategies, worked the competitive environment with the Java Plug-In technology, and was fundamental to the creation and establishment of the Java Community Process(SM) program. Les Kohn is recognized for his architecture of Sun's first 64 bit processor -- UltraSPARC(R) I when he first joined Sun in the early 1990's. Kohn is also a pioneer in Chip Multi-threading and his model for Throughput Computing will be used in all of Sun's Volume Systems product line and future projects. Guy Steele is accorded the honor in recognition of his contributions to the Java Programming Language in the area of technical computing. Since co-authoring the Java Language Specification book with James Gosling and Bill Joy, Dr. Steele has made great strides in advocating Java language evolution in areas such as generic types. Steele has also made significant contributions to small fast networks, parallel algorithms and architectures, scalable synchronization, and flagless floating-point, where he has set out to change floating point standards to allow faster computation. Marc Tremblay has been an outstanding innovator at Sun since starting his career at Sun 12 years ago. He started and led such technologies as UltraSPARC I, UltraSPARC II, picoJava(TM), and MAJC(TM). Dr. Tremblay's work in Chip Multi Processor, multi-threading, hardware scout, space-time computing, transactional memory, execute ahead, are forming the base for the entire SPARC architecture platform with an emphasis on Throughput Computing.