(July 25, 2006)--The College of Computing’s Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) division has received a Sun Microsystems Academic Excellence Grant (AEG) for the donation of two fully-configured Sun Fire T2000 Servers valued at $33,990. Sun grants equipment to eligible organizations that develop creative projects addressing Sun’s investment priorities and form partnerships for success.

CSE Associate Professor David Bader is leading the project titled, “Optimizing Computational Science Applications on Sun Multithreaded Processors.” Bader aims to design, implement, and optimize computational science applications for the Sun Fire T2000 Server using the multicore Sun UltraSPARC T1 processor that supports 32 simultaneous processing threads. Bader’s prior work demonstrates good symmetric multiprocessor performance for applications in computational biology and national security, and this Sun AEG explores the extension of these applications to Sun’s multicore processor.

Each Sun Fire T2000 Server contains an 8-core 1.0GHz UltraSPARC T1 processor, 16GB of DDR2 memory, and runs Solaris 10. Sun describes the UltraSPARC T1 processor with CoolThreads technology as “the highest throughput and most eco-responsible processor ever created. Drawing about as much power as a light bulb, its unprecedented 32 simultaneous processing threads gives the best performance per watt of any processor available.”

For more information about Associate Professor David Bader, click here.

For information about Sun Microsystems, click here.