Sun Open House (No, Not Open Source)

The world of research labs can be a confusing one. We've all heard about Bell Labs. Then there's Microsoft Research (which I wrote about last week), a bunch of IBM labs, the legendary Xerox PARC, and a raft of government labs scattered from Los Alamos to Brookhaven and back. And all those are just for starters. But one research facility we don't hear much about is Sun Labs.

That's surprising considering that of the approximately 170 employees, two--James Gosling and Guy Steele Jr.--of the five Sun Fellows who work there have received Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Awards.

In an effort to elevate its visibility, Sun Labs recently hosted, in concert with the Computer History Museum, an open house that featured peeks at next generation technologies and talks by Sun research scientists. Sun Labs is no garage-shop operation. Since launching the research facility in 1991, Sun has invested nearly $2 billion per year in R&D, much of which has found its way back into Sun product units. That may change, however, due to the company's recently announced restructuring plans.

According to Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos, Sun's R&D efforts will emphasize emerging technologies for service architectures. He added that although Sun will continue to develop products for traditional corporate computing, much of the company's research will focus on scaleable hardware/software for organizations with business models similiar to Salesforce.com, Amazon.com, and Google. On the corporate IT side, Papadopoulos said advances will be made to help large service providers manage networks tied together in clusters or grids as well as developing operating systems standards for what he called to as "horizontal computing." Central to this will be Sun's focus on
multithreaded architectures powered by multicore processors.

Among other projects showcased, Sun researchers showed an innovative media browser that lets users search for, say, movie titles based genres, rather than lists and so on. Another project optimized database architectures on clusters, while others used wireless sensors programmed in Java. Yet another project combined social-networking and video-conferencing so people can interact over high-resolution video screens.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 09:53 AM  Permalink