Prestigious fellowship awarded to the most senior rank within Sun's engineering organization -- Sun Microsystems today announced that it has appointed a new Sun Fellow, Tim Marsland. The award signifies a rare event at Sun, with only twelve other individuals having had the honor throughout the company's history. "Over the past 15 years, Marsland's technical leadership and innovative thinking have been evident in the extraordinary role he has played in developing and enhancing the Solaris Operating System," said Greg Papadopoulos, executive vice president of research and development and CTO, Sun Microsystems, "His work has had a significant impact on the future of operating systems in the x86 market, and his efforts contributed largely to the early design work of virtualization with Solaris Zones and the Solaris Containers feature for the Solaris 10 OS." Most recently, Marsland designed the Solaris Express release model and played a critical role in the revival of the Solaris 10 Operating System(OS) on x86 platform, including the top-level architecture, direction and implementation. He is also widely recognized for playing an instrumental role in making the Solaris OS 10 free, open source and usable on x86 and x64(x86, 64-bit) platforms. Sun Fellows Highly prestigious, the title of Sun Fellow is the most senior rank that can be attained within Sun's engineering organization. Sun looks to its 13 Fellows to help guide its technical development, including identifying new opportunities and advising the management team on technical issues. The appointment of Tim Marsland adds to the elite group of Fellows at Sun, who include Richard Dee, Jim Hughes, Nick Aneshansley, Whitfield Diffie, Graham Hamilton, Guy Steele, Marc Tremblay, James Gosling, Jim Mitchell, Mike Splain, Ivan Sutherland and Bob Sproull.