BALTIMORE - Supercomputing 2002 -- Demonstrating its efforts to advance open, standards-based solutions in academia, Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) selected Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center as a Sun Center of Excellence (COE) in New Generation Networks, Grids and Portals. Through the center's development of a scientific research portal, an environment that provides access to computational services using advanced grid infrastructure, researchers will be able to seamlessly access the high performance computing environment (HPCE) -- and focus on scientific problems rather than computational operations. The benefits of the scientific research can be applied to a wider range of business partners and government applications such as distributed storage, back-up and recovery applications, developmental test-bed environments for benchmarking new applications, security capability testing and resource sharing across enterprises. "As a Sun Center of Excellence, we are able to foster collaboration among the scientific research community in portal and distributed computing technologies that can be applied to both business and government applications," said Dr. Maciej Stroinski, technical director of Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center. "Through Sun's COE initiative, we are able to work with partner institutions around the world on leading edge technologies to exchange know-how and share best practices." The Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center is powered by two Sun Fire[tm] 6800 servers clustered with the new, ultra-high-bandwidth and low latency Sun Fire[tm] Link and connected by the PIONIER - Polish Optical Network with the third one installed in Cyfronet AGH, Krakow. Additionally, distributed data system powered by two Sun Fire[tm] V880 Workgoup Servers supports the cluster with the data replication and management services. The COE environment will run on this cluster utilizing the Sun[tm] ONE Grid Engine software, built for experiments with new technologies for large, heterogeneous grid infrastructures. The unique and outstanding quality of the wide area network, managed by the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, will allow researchers to access resources and share data from multiple places in Poland. "The research and development work being undertaken at the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center will lead to creating programming tools for grid-portal systems and the advancement of distributed computing" said Joerg Schwarz, manager for Science and Engineering Business Development of Sun Microsystems Global Education and Research unit. "Sun is at the forefront of technology innovation and the COE program allows us to share this groundbreaking technology with the scientific community to advance critical research." Sun's Center of Excellence program includes more than 30 centers worldwide in the areas of high performance computing, computational biology, digital libraries and e-learning. Sun in Education Sun is a leading provider of open network computing solutions to colleges and universities around the world, powering academic, research and high performance computing systems, campus administration, digital libraries and student instruction systems. In addition, Sun is committed to connecting the world's students to the Internet, beginning with primary and secondary schools and extending to all levels of higher education. For information about Sun in Education's computational biology programs, please visit http://www.sun.com/edu/hpc.