Major Chinese Universities Choose OpenSPARC

As you read this, I'll be in Shanghai at Sun's China Education and Research Conference, learning about the latest developments in China's education community. One of these developments — announced in February at our Worldwide Education and Research Conference in San Francisco — is that Sun and the Chinese Ministry of Education (MOE) have signed a three-year collaboration agreement based on Sun's OpenSPARC program. The MOE selected OpenSPARC because it is the fastest microprocessor in the world, and because Sun is the only major processor vendor to freely offer its designs to the open source community.

Sun Chairman Scott McNealy and China's Xu Ming announce OpenSPARC collaboration at the WWERC

As an emerging market, China has a strong demand for integrated circuit engineers, and this agreement will help cultivate that talent. China will be able to educate students on the latest processor innovations, including chip multithreading (CMT) and software coding that take advantage of multithreading. Chinese universities that participate in the program will develop their own textbooks, workshops and labs programs. Meanwhile, the Chinese MOE and Sun will jointly promote best practices throughout China.

"We've extended the OpenSPARC ecosystem to embrace the world's fastest-growing technology community," said Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president and CEO. "This relationship gives the People's Republic of China access to the tools and the freedom to develop the intellectual property framework it needs to cultivate native microprocessors and microprocessor engineers, while opening a huge market for the OpenSPARC community.

"This is a launching point for similar relationships with economies and universities worldwide," Schwartz said, "and an unmistakable endorsement of Sun's open source approach to building opportunity across software, systems, and microelectronics."

Professor Zhao Qinping, vice minister of the MOE, said, "We appreciate Sun's open source strategy, especially Sun's outstanding contribution in the open source IC (integrated circuit) area, and we encourage active cooperation between China's universities and Sun in teaching and research. We believe the cooperation will be beneficial in advancing China's teaching and research level in the IC area."

Collaboration Supports Education, Research and Industry Development

The collaboration between Sun and the Chinese MOE covers three areas. Sun and the MOE will train and qualify 100 to 150 educators each year in OpenSPARC technology, select Chinese universities to develop "MOE-Sun Excellence Courses," and leverage OpenSPARC to enhance experiments and hands-on training.

One of the institutions involved is Peking University. "As one of China's leading universities in microelectronics, Peking University never stops its efforts to integrate the world's leading-edge technology and industry trends into its teaching and research," said Wang Yangyuan, academician of the Chinese Academy of Science and dean of the Department of Microelectronics at Peking University. "OpenSPARC T2 is one of the most advanced open source multicore CPU technologies in the industry. It provides us a great opportunity to upgrade our processor and SoC design-related curricula and research."

Second, selected Chinese universities will collaborate on research projects based on OpenSPARC. Sun and the MOE will also establish OpenSPARC MOE-Sun Centers of Excellence to expand these projects.

"CMP (chip multiprocessor) and CMT technologies are the emerging trends in CPU and SoC (system on a chip) design," said Professor Wang Dongsheng, director of the CPU and SoC Center at Tsinghua University and deputy director of the computer architecture committee for the China Computer Federation. "They provide critical new topics and challenges for the study and practice of computer architecture. Sun's OpenSPARC project provides an impeccable opportunity for in-depth research in this area. We look forward to cooperating with Sun in this area in terms of both teaching and research."

Finally, the agreement will establish industry-university cooperation models to bridge the gap between academic research and industry productization. It will help facilitate the transformation of academic research results into industry products, and incubate IC design firms started within universities to help develop the China IC industry.

Sun, CMT, and OpenSPARC

Sun launched the chip multithreading revolution in 2005 with the introduction of the UltraSPARC T1 processor, the industry's first eight-core, 32-thread, general-purpose processor. Through the efficient use of multiple cores with multiple, parallel threads, the UltraSPARC T1 proved that CMT is the only effective solution to the growing gap between processor and memory performance.

In 2007, Sun introduced the second generation of CMT processors, the UltraSPARC T2, the world's fastest commodity processor, with eight cores and eight threads per core running the Solaris 10 Operating System.

Since then, Sun has provided the designs of both chips to the open source community. Sun released the OpenSPARC T1 RTL (register transfer level) files in March 2006, and released the OpenSPARC T2 RTL files in December 2007. Both designs may be downloaded at www.opensparc.net.

OpenSPARC Centers of Excellence

In the U.S., Sun has established six major universities as OpenSPARC Centers of Excellence: the University of California, Santa Cruz; University of Texas, Austin; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Stanford University; and Carnegie Mellon University. Each Center of Excellence has a minimum two-year commitment, during which time they'll execute chip design research and coursework based on Sun's chip multithreading design.

This latest announcement with the Chinese MOE has benefits for everyone: students, faculty, researchers, and of course, the worldwide business community. The students who learn OpenSPARC technology as a result of this collaboration will be empowered to accelerate innovation on top of the OpenSPARC design.

They'll innovate in ways we've never imagined. Those innovations will contribute back into the community, and that makes the technology that much better.

Best regards,

Joe Hartley
VP, Global Government, Education and Healthcare
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Questions or comments? Please email education_news@sun.com