Dear Colleague,

You have probably heard about Sun's newly released multithreaded processor, the UltraSPARC T1, and Sun's new servers that use it, the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000.

Sun has announced plans to open source the design for this chip and we plan to make the tools to use it available for research and porting starting this spring.

Some may have missed the fact that it runs on 32 64-bit threads simultaneously, which is quite ahead of the curve. It also comes with full server-level virtual machine capability built in, and we are open sourcing the full design for it. It also runs existing SPARC software applications with the Solaris 10 Operating System (which has also been open sourced) and soon should have multiple versions of Linux capable of running on it as well.

Sun will be working to make it the new industry standard, and we believe it is best to be open. In fact, a whole stack of tools around OpenSPARC, including simulation, verification, virtualization, the Solaris 10 OS, the Java Enterprise System middleware stack, the compiler, and tools for tuning applications on multiple threads will all be made either freely available or open sourced or both.

You can participate with us in using, exploring, and developing this open technology as we release its design this spring. Specifications for it are available now at the OpenSPARC T1 home page.

The chip uses a new design approach to optimize for throughput to overcome the memory/performance/energy wall. The benchmarks we've released demonstrate how successfully it meets its objective.

The UltraSPARC T1 processor optimizes for throughput and efficiency on integer workloads, but not for heavy floating point work. We believe this is the first major step in to the new seriously multi-threaded future, and sets a new direction for server processors. Researchers are currently looking at:

• Performance analysis, simulation, and modeling
• Development and optimizations for multicore chips
• SoftCores for multicore FPGA implementations
• Optimizing and developing software for multicore systems
• EDA opportunities in simulation and verification
• Developing multithreaded EDA applications and other tools

If you, your associates, or graduate students would like to participate directly with us, you can sign up for information and read about the program at the OpenSPARC University Research Web site and at www.opensparc.net

Sincerely yours,