Sun Shines light on European Universities
Sun Microsystems, one of the first big Silicon Valley start-ups, came in to being around 30 years ago when hardware specialists at Stanford University and Software specialists at the University of California at Berkley, worked together to create what would eventually become Solaris.
In keeping a university theme, Sun announced that it has partnered with Europractice, a non-profit company that distributes and supports electronic design automation software to 650 universities across Europe.
The organisation is managed by Rutherford Appelton Laboratory, which is based in Didcot, Oxfordshire, and was commissioned by Queen Elizabeth II to promote scientific research and instruction in the UK.
Europractice was launched in 1995 to promote chip research in Europe. Europractice came after the Eurochip project, which was founded in the early 1990s to train students in the use of EDA tools and other chip designs. These days Europractice generates over ¾’s of its funding through the sale of EDA software licenses and support contracts and he rest through the European Union.
The agreement with Sun will last for three years. Europractice will distribute the Verilog files that describe the OpenSparc implementation of the “Niagara” Sparc T1 and T2 processors to the educational institutions connected to Europractice, and will also help them establish Open Sparc as a reference platform on which students can research. Both companies are to hold a contest across the universities to get students involved in playing with the OpenSparc design.
Shrenik Mehta, senior director of front end technologies and the OpenSparc platform at Sun, says that there have been almost 10,000 downloads of the OpenSparc T1 and T2 design files since they were made available in March 2005, adding that there has also been 7,000 downloads of the OpenSparc chip’s software.
The software comes with the virtualization hypervisor that implements logical domain partitions on the Niagara chips, the CoolTools power management software for the chips, and a chip simulator. At this point 100 universities have played around with the chips, but Sun wants more.
On a side note: Although the Sparc T1 and T2 designs have been open sourced, there won’t be open files for the Sparc T2+ or UltraSparc-RK “Rock” processor designs.
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