GOVERNMENT

DENVER, CO -- Sun Microsystems Inc., and EPCC (Edinburgh Parallel Computing Center) of the University of Edinburgh - recently named a Sun Center of Excellence (COE) - today announced their official alliance supporting EPCC's lead role within the UK National e-Science Center and the e-Science Program. As part of the alliance, the Edinburgh COE for Parallel and Distributed Computing will be used to develop Grid and High Performance Computing (HPC) methods and applications, and to integrate them with science and business portals. Sun also has named the London e-Science Center (LeSC) at Imperial College - a UK Regional e-Science Center - as a Sun Center of Excellence in e-Science. Sun is working closely with EPCC and LeSC to provide Grid and e-Science services to the UK and Europe through the UK's e-Science Program. EPCC's and Imperial College's COEs are designed to facilitate their efforts through the active collaboration within the science and Grid computing communities to provide open, scalable and commercially viable Grid and HPC solutions for the advancement of e-Science. "We have been working closely with EPCC on parallel computing projects to help advance e-Science initiatives in the UK for the last three years. Establishing this Center of Excellence is a testament to EPCC's leadership in HPC and Sun's continued commient to creating reliable and proven Grid and HPC computing solutions for the e-Science community," said Wolfgang Gentzsch, director of Grid middleware for Sun Microsystems. The EPCC Center of Excellence Based on Sun's leading Grid infrastructure technologies, the EPCC Center of Excellence will enable a variety of industry and business partners from around the UK to use and evaluate Grid, distributed management and portal technologies through a series of projects. The COE environment will consist of a cluster of three Sun Fire 6800 Midframe servers that will be located and centrally managed at EPCC to enable academic and research collaborators to utilize the system and participate in research efforts. The distributed computing environment also will be based on a wide range of Sun Grid and HPC technologies, including Sun Grid Engine software, iPlanet Portal Server, Sun Management Center, HPC Cluster tools, Forte Workshop tools, and Sun StorEdge technology. This installation, and future installations, will be linked through EPCC's high-bandwidth network to the UK's SuperJANET academic network, allowing researchers and industrial partners to benefit from distributed computing solutions and HPC applications on a project basis. "Grid technology will enable us to solve new scientific challenges, extract knowledge for data more effectively and make access to state-of-the-art facilities and data repositories easier," said Dr Arthur Trew, director of EPCC and deputy director of the National e-Science Center. "At EPCC, we are interested not only in working with companies such as Sun to develop these new technologies, but also in exploiting them to benefit both academia and business. Grid technology is the key enabler of this century's IT revolution and we're thrilled to be a part of it." The London e-Science Center's Center Of Excellence Sun also has a long-standing relationship with Imperial College of London. For the past ten years, the Imperial College has been the host of SunSITE (Sun Software, Information and Technology Exchange) in Northern Europe, the oldest and largest capacity SunSITE in operation. With this solid working foundation in place, the new Sun Center of Excellence at the London e-Science Center will go beyond the SunSITE concept to establish a Sun e-Science Portal powered by a 24-processor Sun Fire 6800 Midframe server and 24TB tape silo. The initial research at the Imperial College COE will be dedicated to providing cross-platform Grid functionality. Specifically, the Center will focus on enhancements to Sun Grid Engine software in the areas of scheduling, interfaces, resource allocation and reservation, and interoperation with other Grid middleware, such as Globus. The London e-Science Center will be using Gridware, Sun's open source resource management software, to manage local clustered computing resources distributed within the College. These will be federated into a "campus grid" to provide the College's research community with a single entry point to all of the College's computation resources. "We will use the Sun Fire E6800's sophisticated hardware features to provide a resilient heart to the Imperial College Grid," said Dr. Steven Newhouse, LeSC technical director. "It will be used to develop and run the eScience portal and act as the central scheduler to the federated College resources." For further information visit www.sun.com