PROCESSORS

Illustrating the compelling value and performance of Sun Microsystems' (NASDAQ:SUNW) entry-level systems, the company today announced that more than 50 percent of its customer sites highlighted on this year's Top 500 Supercomputers list are powered by its Sun Fire(TM) V60x Compute Grid supercomputers. At the heart of installations including the University of Queensland (Australia) and Saudi Aramco, and in San Diego Supercomputer Center's RockStar cluster, the Sun Fire V60x Compute Grid system delivers high performance for compute-intensive applications in life sciences, seismic processing and reservoir modeling, scientific research environments astrophysics to quantum chemistry. The Sun Fire V60x server is also a key component in Sun's Compute Grid Rack Clusters, which deliver a flexible, scalable, low-cost building block for implementing grid computing. The latest Top 500 list includes 11 Sun Fire V60x Compute Grid system entries demonstrating the rapid adoption of Sun's low-cost computing initiative in the high performance and technical computing (HPTC) market. "The pre-assembled, pre-cabled Sun Fire V60x Compute Grid system provides excellent price/performance and reduces the cost and complexity of manually dealing with hundreds of cables and boxes," said Shahin Khan, vice president of Sun's HPTC business unit. "At the other end of the spectrum, the Sun Fire 15K Compute Grid supercluster relies on the Sun Fire Link interconnect and offers excellent price/productivity with very large memory and a simplified programming environment. Both systems are represented in the Top 500 list." Sun supercomputing innovations have a prominent position in the education market with nearly one-third of the Top 500 list representing academia. The University of Queensland (Australia), Aachen University (Germany), Pennsylvania State University, Cambridge University (United Kingdom) and University of Delaware among others earned spots on the Top 500 list. With universities demanding a huge amount of reliable computing power to drive academic research, Sun's grid computing technologies are enabling the growth of scientific research both efficiently and cost effectively. Sun's historic commitment to advancing academic research in the campus environment continues to foster scientific breakthroughs unimaginable just years ago. The Sun Fire V60x server's strong presence on this year's list is backed by Sun's performance in the Technical Departmental (throughput oriented servers with average selling prices below $250K) category on IDC's Technical Server Qview Report, 8/26/03. Sun outgrew the segment year over year, in both revenues and shipments. Shipments grew 51 percent for Sun versus 32 percent for the market. Both the Sun Fire V60x Compute Grid system and Sun Fire 15K Compute Grid supercluster will be on display this week in Sun's booth #623 at the Supercomputing 2003 conference in Phoenix.