PALO ALTO, CA -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced the results of "Tunathon," an innovative program to study and tune customer application performance on Sun's Solaris(TM) Operating Environment (OE) on SPARC(TM) platform. The program, which focused on applications from 35 different companies, resulted in an average performance increase of 75 percent. "The work done by Sun and Merrill Lynch's Risk Analysis and Management (RAM) scalability team as part of the Tunathon program has proven to be extremely successful. Using Sun's new UltraSPARC(TM) III-based Sun Fire(TM) Midframe servers, the Solaris 8 OE, and Forte(TM) Developer 6, update 2 software, we obtained a performance increase for this key application in Sun's labs of almost 150 percent," said Kishor Laud, director, Merrill Lynch. "RAM is a strategic application used by our traders for derivatives pricing, profit and loss calculation, and risk and scenario analysis, as well as transaction and portfolio management. By giving our traders more timely access to critical data, this type of optimization would go right to our mission of superior client service." The Tunathon program brought teams of engineers from various cross-functional Sun organizations, from sales to product development, together with the developers of the customer applications. The teams analyzed 35 customer applications, including systems that simulated galactic collisions, analyzed gene sequencing and processed DNA comparisons, with the goal of optimizing their performance on Solaris OE and the SPARC platform. "From the outset, the goal of the Tunathon program was to work with customers to understand how real-world applications perform on the Sun Solaris and SPARC platform and how those applications could be optimized for peak performance," said Peter Young, vice president, Forte Tools, Sun Microsystems. "The hard work of engineers in the Tunathon program met both of these goals. Not only did we gain a valuable understanding of how customers are using applications, but we were able to achieve dramatic performance improvements as well." The Tunathon team defined a methodology for optimizing each application. The team first identified performance "hot spots" using a variety of tuning tools including Sun Performance Analyzer, which is included with Forte Developer 6, update 2. The application's execution behavior was then analyzed to locate bottlenecks, memory issues and computational problems. Depending on the results, source code was recompiled with the latest compilers in Forte Developer, or was rewritten as needed, to improve performance. Sun's Forte tools (http://www.sun.com/forte) are core components of the Sun(TM) Open Net Environment (Sun ONE) -- an open architecture and integratable product portfolio to deliver services on demand. For additional information visit www.sun.com