VISUALIZATION

GLASGOW, SCOTLAND -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) has selected Caltech's Center for Advanced Computing Research as a Sun Center of Excellence (COE) in Large Scale Data Analysis and Storage. Driven by the requirements of major ongoing scientific research projects in academia, government and commerce, the center will address computing issues in performance, availability, movement and management for large datasets beyond the capabilities of current systems. It will analyze large-scale, heterogeneous, distributed scientific data in research at the frontier of science and engineering. The center will focus on advancing data-centric and grid-centric science by utilizing the power of Sun's shared-memory technology. Leveraging activities supported by various grants from the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, CACR will establish research projects with industry segments and foster the development of a community of scientists in fields such as astronomy, physics, digital imaging, seismology and neuroscience. "CACR was established to ensure that the California Institute of Technology is at the forefront of computational science and engineering," said James Pool, executive director of Caltech's Center for Advanced Computing Research. "As a Sun Center of Excellence, we can apply our analytical strength to Sun's cost-effective and scalable technology to advance data-centric and grid-centric research." "CACR's focus on the analysis of large-scale scientific data is complementary to Sun's response to the challenge of providing the performance, scalability, availability and resource management required in high performance computing environments," said Joerg Schwarz, manager of scientific and engineering computing for Sun Microsystems. "This center will advance large-scale data computing by ensuring that Sun's technology supports the data storage and analysis requirements of cutting-edge scientific research." CACR will install a comprehensive, integrated solution from Sun, including Sun StorEdge T3 disk arrays and Sun Fire V880 servers. Other installations are pending in the coming months. Sun's Center of Excellence program includes 34 centers worldwide in the areas of high performance computing, computational biology, digital libraries and e-learning.