6.June.2006 - Earlier this month, Sun Microsystems Laboratories (Sun Labs) in Menlo Park, Calif., was transformed into a bazaar showcasing cutting-edge technology. For two days during the 2006 Sun Labs Open House, demonstrations of emerging products, experimental models, and even mathematical theories excited and inspired Sun employees. Press and analysts were invited to the second day of the Open House. It is the 15th year that Sun Labs has showcased the innovations driven by the insatiable curiosity of its researchers.

The Project Sun SPOT demo drew one of the largest crowds at the Sun Labs Open House.

"Sun's unique competitive advantage and technological edge are based on our ability to innovate, and deploy those innovations," says Greg Papadopoulos, Sun chief technology officer and executive vice president of Research and Development.

"Over the past four years alone, Sun has invested $8 billion in R&D and Sun Labs, the only organization within Sun devoted solely to applied research, is an essential component to our overall R&D strategy. The advances that have come from Sun Labs address the things no one else saw coming--from Java technologies to the Sun Ray thin clients--technologies that have the power to change everything as we build the Participation Age."

Sun Labs is charged with "developing technical options," according to Dr. Robert F. Sproull, vice president, Sun fellow, and director of Sun Labs. At the Open House, Sun Labs researchers and engineers spoke about and demonstrated technology that included ground-breaking system-level research, new Java technology, networking projects, and advanced search applications.

Project Sun SPOT

The Project Sun SPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology) demo drew one of the largest crowds, eager to see the Java software-powered, palm-sized platform capable of instrumenting blimps and rockets, controlling robotic hands and cars, and monitoring a factory-testing system that checks Sun products for excessive vibration.

Based on a 32-bit ARM CPU and an 11-channel 2.4-GHz radio, a Sun SPOT device enables developers to build wireless transducer applications in Java software and use familiar IDEs, such as the NetBeans IDE, to write code. The battery-powered device includes an accelerometer, temperature and light sensors, general purpose I/O, servo and stepper motor control, LEDs, and a USB interface. It runs the Squawk Virtual Machine (VM), which was also on display at the Open House. The Squawk VM is small Java 2 Platform Micro Edition (J2ME platform) virtual machine that allows wireless applications to run directly on the CPU with no underlying operating system.

Project Sun SPOT demos also included the ad hoc deployment of networked Sun SPOT applications, showing autonomous mesh networking, inter-device migration of running applications, and secure over-the-air application deployment.

Sun Labs expects to make a development kit available this summer, which will include two Sun SPOT devices with demo sensor boards, a base station to connect to development machines, and the necessary software development tools and cables.

Researchers also discussed class loading issues in the Java Remote Method Invocation (Java RMI) and the Jini network technology. Additional Java platform projects on display were:

• Sun Java Real-Time System, for predictably interacting with the real world
• Project Jedi, experiments with a malleable, dynamic kernel for the Java platform
• Project Maxwell, developing an object-aware memory architecture, with object management and garbage collection services provided for in hardware, thus allowing the hardware to run Java-based systems more effectively.
• Java Community Process Program, a new Web site provides personalized content

High-Performance Computing Systems

As part of Sun's high-performance computing systems (HPCS) project (sponsored by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), Sun Labs engineers developed modeling engines and tools which enable new methods for application performance modeling, interconnect simulation, and performance analysis of systems enabled by new technologies.

The Java Real-Time System Slot Car Programming Challenge revved up attendees.

Using the tools, researchers have performed extensive architectural explorations into scalable SPARC processor-based systems and AMD Opteron processor-based systems, resulting in possible innovative alternatives to address scalability issues.

An effort to improve price/performance for database architectures is also focused on high-performance computing. The Multi-Tier Clustered Systems project explores innovative architectures which integrate database and other software with advances in the switch fabric, the interconnect fabric, and the processors. The goal is to provide integral factor improvements in price/performance for database architectures on commodity clusters at a similar or better quality of service, relative to conventional SMP databases.

Advanced Search Technologies

Sun Labs researchers also displayed their evolving work on advanced search technologies, including the Search Inside the Music (SITM) project and the Blurbalyzer, both based on the Sun Labs Search Engine.

With the Search Inside the Music (SITM) project, Sun Labs combines several search techniques to create a system that helps listeners discover new music in large online libraries. The project uses automated music analysis to determine how similar songs are, text mining to determine editorial similarity of music reviews, and traditional collaborative filtering. New this year in the SITM project is a 3-D visualization capability, which draws on published album art, for exploring a large music collection.

SITM consists of four components. The feature extractor reduces a music track into a set of features that compactly describe the music. The trainer learns how to best represent music similarity. The evaluator takes the model built by the trainer and applies it to a collection of music. The browser provides the user with a set of features for organizing and finding music.

The Blurbalyzer is a recommendation system that uses text-based document similarity to recommend new books. This contrasts with the approach taken by most online retailers, which use purchase patterns.

Researchers also demonstrated the Knowledge-Driven Hyperlinks Project, which embellishes existing Web pages with additional links that lead to semantically related Web content. The project uses lexical analysis and ontologies to create the links.

Other Projects

The 2006 Open House featured a wide range of demonstrations, including projects focused on system exploration, mathematical analyses, and programming language development.

• Java Real-Time System Slot Car Programming Challenge, which used sensors in a slot car track to demonstrate how a Java RTS can help developers create devices and systems that can predictably interact with the physical world.
• Project Darkstar uses Java technology to simplify the development of massively scalable online video games that can be played on any client device
• Project Neuromancer, which uses medical sensor data to investigate the infrastructure required for large scale telemetry networks
• Project Crossbow, network virtualization technology to improve resource control, performance, and network utilization
• Project Emergence, producing large, powerful, robust systems from small, weak, fragile devices
• Self-Sustaining Systems, exploring alternative software development methodologies and new software architectures for building robust complex computer systems
• HPCS Run Time Executive, extending systems to the peta-scale through improvements to system software and tools, brought about by research on virtualization, reliability, parallelization, and control theory
• Interval Computing, demonstrating an entirely new Boundary Value Method for computing interval solutions to Laplace and heat partial differential equations
• Project Fortress, applying lessons learned from the Java programming language to the next generation of programming languages, particularly on applying dynamic compilation to high productivity computation as part of the Sun DARPA HPCS project

If the question is, "What can technology do?" the answer can invariably be found at Sun Labs. Visit the Sun Labs site for more information on what Sun has in store.