Sun Microsystems, Inc. today added several technology companies as part of the Sun High Performance and Technical Computing (HPTC) Alliance Partner Program geared to advance grid performance for Sun customers. As a testament to Sun's pioneering work in Grid computing, Sun also received the 2004 Award for Excellence in Technology for its Sun Grid Engine Software from analyst firm Frost & Sullivan. "Sun's 20 new HPTC alliance partners represent some of the hottest technologies in the industry and can contribute to building a complete Grid solution." said Shahin Khan, vice president of the HPTC Business Unit at Sun. "Customers need to show real business results with their Grid deployments and Sun can help pull it all together to optimize grid technology for data centers worldwide because of the breadth of our alliances and depth of our expertise." As part of the Sun iForce(tm) partner network, the HPTC Alliance Partner Program launched in January 2004 with an array of interconnect technology partners, aims to provide customers with a wide range of technologies covering data, compute, visualization and access to grid computing solutions. The 20 new grid computing HPTC Alliance partners announced today include the following companies: Avaki ClearSpeed Critical Software, DataDirect Networks, DataSynapse, Dothill, Engineous, Enigmatec, Exludus, GridIron, GridXper, Level 5 Networks, Meiosys, Paremus, Pathscale, PGI, Scali, StorageTek, Streamline Computing and United Devices. Award Winning Software Frost & Sullivan's Excellence in Technology Award brings significant recognition to Sun's grid efforts by acknowledging the company's technology innovation in the Sun(tm) Grid Engine Enterprise Edition software. The software is a distributed resource management system for heterogeneous, distributed environments consisting of compute, memory, and storage units, applications, licenses and data. The software, with its robust workload and policy-based management capabilities, helps increase overall productivity and return on assets, and helps lower total cost of ownership. "Our customer research shows our Sun grid deployments are about half in academic/research and half in enterprise environments, and is well established in both domains today. This is why grid technology is a core component of our systems-based approach for datacenter automation," said David Nelson-Gal, vice president of N1(tm) Grid systems at Sun. "The N1 Grid System provides the core services to efficiently establish, partition, provision and manage enterprise grids, and enables customers to get the most out of existing resources while automating previously costly and error prone activities." The new release of the Sun N1 Grid Engine plans to feature higher scalability (up to 10,000 hosts); advanced resource reservation; and superior accounting and monitoring, to help enable utility-like computing. The research firm believes the product will bring significant contributions to the industry in terms of adoption, change, and competitive posture. The award also highlights the overall technical excellence of the software and its commitment towards technology innovation. "Continuous innovation and improvement in existing technologies characterize Sun and makes the company a leader in grid computing technology," said Amreetha Vijayakumar, research analyst at Frost & Sullivan. "Building on the strength of its grid solutions and strategies, Sun has been driving the growth of this new technology paradigm. The company's growing installed base and enduring market acceptance are testimony to the edge Sun has over its competitors."