During its quarterly earnings call in January, Sun Microsystems profiled some of the new and current customers that recently chose Sun products in its fiscal second quarter. The company experienced an up-tick in customer demand resulting from new products delivered to market in past two quarters. Demonstrating continued market momentum in core industries such as education, customers are rapidly adopting the Solaris 10 Operating System, Sun Java Enterprise System, Sun storage products, and Sun's comprehensive line of industry-standard Sun Fire servers.

Recent education and research customers that have signed with Sun include:

Northwestern University
Northwestern University selected Sun Microsystems to replace a homegrown identity management system with limited capabilities. Leveraging Solaris 10 OS, Sun Fire V210z servers, and the Java Enterprise System, including Sun Java Identity Manager and Sun Java Access Manager, Northwestern University can roll out new single sign-on and identity management that is flexible, affordable, and compatible with the standards of its numerous academic and administrative applications.

The Scripps Research Institute, Florida
Scripps Florida is a state-of-the-art biomedical research institute located in Jupiter, Florida (Palm Beach County) on the campus of Florida Atlantic University (FAU). Scripps Florida selected Sun for a stable, scalable and cost-effective compute cluster solution to support bio-research initiatives. The new compute cluster is comprised of Sun Fire V20z and V40z servers running Sun N1 Grid Engine and attached to Sun StorEdge 3510 FC arrays. The Sun Solution Center for High Performance Computing was engaged to conduct benchmark tests with customer applications, and the Sun Customer Ready Systems Program to pre-load, -integrate, and -test the solution prior to shipment. Sun also provided Scripps Florida with onsite implementation services, support services and new systems' training. The compute cluster is running multiple bio-research tools and applications for more than 100 researchers.

Tokyo Institute of Technology
One of the world's leading technical institutes, Tokyo Institute of Technology is creating Japan's largest supercomputer on Sun technology to help its science and engineering researchers dramatically increase their productivity. The system will be based on Sun Fire x64 servers with 10,480 AMD Opteron processor cores — totaling more than 50 trillion floating point operations per second. Using Sun N1 System Manager and Sun N1 Grid Engine software, the system will be provisioned to support the Solaris 10 Operating System as well as Linux operating environment. The grid-based supercomputer plans to expand to more than 100 teraFLOPS by its operation in spring 2006 and is moving toward becoming one of the five largest supercomputers in the world as ranked by Top 500 in summer 2006.

University of Alberta, Faculty of Engineering
Sun Fire server and StorEdge technologies are continuing to shape nanotechnology research being conducted by University of Alberta's Faculty of Engineering. Building on investments in Sun technology made in 2003, the award-winning research team has commenced a second phase of its IT system expansion with the acquisition of Sun Fire V40z and X4100 servers as well as Sun StorEdge 6130 and 6920 arrays running on Solaris OS. The new x64 implementation will help facilitate future growth, reduce operating costs, and increase the University of Alberta's ability to develop research tools necessary for retaining its position among the top six international leaders in nanotechnology research.

University of California, Los Angeles
The Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI) at UCLA has selected Sun systems, software, and services as the computational infrastructure for its comprehensive mapping of brain structure and function. By studying and comparing the structure and function of healthy and unhealthy brains, LONI seeks to better understand brain development and the differences between healthy and diseased brains. LONI has already made significant advances in understanding Alzheimer's, AIDS, and brain development. LONI is using over 300 Sun Fire V20z servers running the Solaris 10 OS, the Sun N1 Grid Engine, and Sun Control.

The University of Southern California
The University of Southern California (USC) Center for High-Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) added 360 of Sun's dual-core Sun Fire V20z x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers to its powerful supercomputer cluster. The HPCC selected the servers for their advanced cooling capabilities, smaller form factor, energy efficiency and superior price/performance. Driven by a steady desire to strengthen the performance and capability of its supercomputing server cluster, which is currently ranked as the 24th-fastest supercomputer in the world on the Top 500 list, the recent addition of the Sun Fire V20z server increased USC's HPCC system total number of compute nodes from 1716 to 1830.