SYSTEMS

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced today the creation of a new, expanded High Performance and Technical Computing (HPTC) business unit to span Sun and drive HPTC customer requirements to a broader range of future developments. The move brings into a single view Sun's HPTC products, programs and investments across all of its divisions, including software, services, sales, storage and computer systems products. Sun also announced Shahin Khan as vice president of the new High Performance and Technical Computing business unit. Highly respected throughout the industry and considered among Sun's top luminaries since joining the systems company in 1996, Khan is chartered with integrating product development plans and spearheading HPTC marketing and strategy initiatives into the future. "From the Sun Fire(TM) V880z visualization server, which I consider the hottest graphics system on the market today, to Sun's HPC Storage Area Network technologies and its Sun(TM) ONE Grid Engine software, Sun has the broadest set of offerings for the HPTC market," said Shahin Khan, vice president of Sun's High Performance and Technical Computing business unit. "In addition, other foundation technologies such as Project JXTA or chip multithreading promise to provide not just high performance but also high productivity to Sun customers." Sun Outpacing the Pack in Market Growth Demonstrating its intense focus on the HPTC market, Sun posted dramatic growth on the most recent "Top 500" supercomputers list with 88 customer entries, a two-fold increase over last year's June list. While IBM and HP lost more than 30 systems each on the latest listing in November 2002, Sun more than doubled its presence, surpassing SGI and moving up from fourth position to third. The listings help illustrate Sun's tremendous growth in the HPTC market over the last six years. The latest Top 500 list shows that 18 percent of the organizations -- in a range of commercial and technical industries -- base their systems on Sun hardware and software. Additionally, according to IDC, Sun has increased its high performance technical computing market share faster than any other vendor, increasing its market presence by approximately 20 percent since 1996. Unmatched Product Portfolio for HPTC Market "In many cases, the HPTC market has been a leading indicator for future business-computing requirements," said Khan. "64-bit systems, parallel computing, hierarchical storage management, data visualization, grid computing, and even the web itself are examples of technologies that started in the HPTC space and went on to become standard parts of computing. Sun's current heavy investments in research and development will continue to be a driving force in this sector." Sun's new HPTC business unit has an end-to-end view across the company, including the following product areas: -- Sun Blade(TM) workstations for powerful, 64-bit desktop computing. -- Entry-level Sun Fire servers and blade servers that can be clustered to provide high performance computing as well as high productivity computing through Sun's N1(TM) provisioning server technology. -- High-end SMP Sun Fire servers that scale up to 106 CPUs and offer full binary compatibility with Sun's entire line of UltraSPARC(R)-based systems built on the award-winning Solaris(TM) Operating System, including Sun Blade workstations and entry-level servers. -- High performance storage technologies and HPC SAN solutions. -- Software offerings, including Sun HPC ClusterTools(TM) and Sun ONE Grid Engine software, which today powers some 7,000 grids worldwide. -- Industry-leading Sun Fire Link optical interconnects that allow for Terascale computing. -- Price/performance leading visualization solutions based on Sun's new Sun Fire V880z visualization server. -- Industry-unique technologies like interval arithmetic for complex numerical problems, computing tasks that cannot easily be solved any other way. -- Entry-level systems and support based on the Linux platform. About Sun Microsystems, Inc. Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://sun.com/ .