Sun Microsystems today announced that the D. E. Shaw group, a specialized investment and technology development firm, will use Sun servers to run the complex financial analysis applications and molecular modeling and other life sciences simulations utilized by the firm's in-house research staff. The financial applications will run on the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS). Based on its long-term historical success with Sun, the New York-based D. E. Shaw group purchased more than 1,700 x64-based Sun Fire servers powered with AMD Opteron processors for its massive grid computing environments. The firm will deploy the financial services compute grid on Solaris 10 OS. "Our success depends on running complex applications that require advanced computing power," said Peter Reiss, Senior Vice President of D. E. Shaw & Co., L.P. "Sun's advancement with Solaris 10 and expertise in grid computing will help us achieve our computational goals and develop best-in-class quantitative analysis solutions while reducing our operational and financial risk." "We're seeing more and more leading financial services companies relying on Sun to support business critical applications. Our success with the D. E. Shaw group further exemplifies our strong position in the marketplace and shows how Sun can work with diverse companies in this sector," said Stuart Wells, executive vice president, Strategic Development and Sun Financing, Sun Microsystems, Inc.