By Leslie T. O'Neill

May 1, 2007 - Last week, researchers from Sun Microsystems Laboratories (Sun Labs) came out to play — and invited Sun employees, customers, friends, members of the press, and analysts to get their hands on the Labs' latest cutting-edge technology. During the 16th annual Sun Labs Open House, researchers and engineers demonstrated emerging products, explained progress made to ongoing research, and even signed their own books. From security to storage, mail to music, Squawk to Sun SPOTs, innovation was the order of the day.

"The mission of Sun Labs is to look beyond the horizon to identify and solve the hardest technical problems businesses and governments may face. We identify these challenges by working closely with customers and engineers from within Sun's business units to gauge customer needs and then collaborating on solutions," said Bob Sproull, director of Sun Labs and a Sun Fellow.

— Whitfield Diffie at the book signing.

The 2007 Sun Labs Open House featured 20 talks by some of Sun's leading research scientists, including senior research Dr. Robert Drost, who discussed Sun's chip communication and packaging innovations; Sun Fellow Dr. Radia Perlman, who described Project Ephemerizer to provide assured delete of data files; and Distinguished Engineer Dr. James Waldo, who addressed the scaling requirements for massive multi-player online games. The first session of the day filled quickly — Whitfield Diffie, Sun Fellow and Chief Security Officer, and Susan Landau, Distinguished Engineer, spoke to the security issues surrounding Internet communication, particularly interception issues such as the privacy implications of building surveillance capabilities into the U.S. communications system; afterwards, they held a book signing for their new edition of "Privacy on the Line: the Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption."

"One big lead [the United States] is still holding on to is innovation," said Diffie. "Regulation could weaken Internet security, crush the most promising possibilities of the Internet, and move innovation offshore."

Avatars and Robots

More than 25 technology demonstrations were underway, each passionate technologist surrounded by a circle of eager enthusiasts.

— Nicole Yankelovich demonstrates MPK 20

Generating some of the most excitement was MPK 20: Sun's Virtual Workplace, which is based on the Project Darkstar gaming platform and the Project Wonderland 3D virtual world. In this virtual office, employees can interact with team members in meeting rooms as well as bump into colleagues' avatars in the hallway. Documents can be created, edited, and shared in this virtual office. Conversations are enabled by Voice Bridge, Java software that handles VoIP (Voice over IP) audio communication and mixing for conference calls, voice chat, speech detection, and audio for 3D virtual environments.

In MPK 20, Voice Bridge gives users the sense of being in the midst of a physical interaction — as your avatar gets closer to another, his voice becomes louder and clearer, and it fades as your avatar moves away. Sound is incredibly life-like and high-fidelity. Voice Bridge allows users to adjust mixes for individual conversations within a conference call as well as private side conversations.

In a darkened corner, Snapp Radio was broadcasting its mashup of Sun's Search Inside the Music audio mapping technology, the tags listeners have associated to songs on Last.fm, and Flickr photos that users have tagged to particular songs. Immediately, Snapp Radio represents a new way for listeners to discover music, based on Sun's music search software that automatically classifies music, generates tags for each song, and predicts song recommendations. Eventually, it could become a new development framework for delivering millions of songs to users; because Search Inside the Music is based on Java, it will be easy to integrate into a variety of platforms, such as cell phones.

"Sun is using this project to look at the very important area of multimedia in Web 2.0 and to understand how it works," explained Douglas Eck, a visiting professor from the University of Montreal who is lending his expertise in machine learning.

Addressing the more troublesome side of the next generation Web was "Web 2.0 Security — a New Foundation for Tomorrow's Online Banking and Commerce Transactions." In this demo, visitors were shown a vision for a new security pipe that would replace the https pipe and eradicate the scourge of phishing: multi-factor, mutual authentication with server name binding and non-repudiation. Essentially, the user and the bank's server would each have a set of "ingredients" that would need to perfectly mesh in order for the transaction to be approved, which negates the need for a password to be sent over — and possibly plucked from — the wire.

— David G. Simmons, Sun Labs Staff Engineer, demonstrates Sun SPOTs.

Like Search Inside the Music, much progress has been made since the Java-based Project Sun SPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology) was shown at last year's open house. The 2007 Sun Labs Open House showcased the wide variety of real-world applications in sensor networks for Sun SPOTs, including customized GPS units, humidity sensors in a Project Blackbox unit, package tracking devices, and a modified Roomba robot. Sun SPOTs can collect and transmit all matter of data, including temperature, vibration, and direction — useful when making sure all the bags of money are travelling together in an armored car, for example — and can hold as much as 8GB of data in two tiny storage cards. One demo also showed off the Sun SPOT features related to mesh routing and the discovery of devices and services, and another showed how ordinary users can deploy these tiny devices securely. The Sun SPOT Developer Kit is available to purchase in the US.

Demonstrations Galore

The buzz of exclamations and interested chatter could be heard around several other technology demonstrations as well, including:

• Project Squawk: Architecture and Future of a Small JVM — this research project, which seeks better ways to build virtual machines (VMs), implements a fully-compliant JME CLDC 1.1 VM written in Java.
• Project Celeste — massively scalable storage, a Celeste system is a reliable, highly distributed file storage system that scales upwards of 1025 bytes of read/write storage.
• MailFinder 2.0 — new interface that can search more than 3.5 million e-mail messages sent to public aliases inside Sun.
• Project Sedna: Next Generation Switch — the first prototype of a multi-chip module based on Proximity Communication, allowing for a flat, monolithic switch element of unparalleled scale.
• Proximity Communication — an I/O technology that enables chips to communicate without wires, it offers a 100-fold increase in I/O density and lowers power consumption, eliminating one of the major bottlenecks limiting computing performance.
• Project Fortress — new parallel programming language invented for high productivity computing (HPC) applications.
• Electric VLSI Design System — an open-source integrated-circuit design system that is written in Java and includes many built-in synthesis and analysis tools.
• Crossbow: Network Virtualization — NIC Virtualization and Resource Control allocates shares of bandwidth and CPU resources to each virtual machine, protocol, or service.
• Sun Media Receiver — a development platform for Java-based TV clients, combining a complete Java ME application environment with Java Media APIs on a reference hardware set-top box. SMR enables service providers to offer pure Java-based services in the home.

Sun Labs was founded in 1991 as Sun's applied research facility, and since then has given rise to some of the company's most successful innovations, including the Java software platform, the SPARC V9 architecture specifications, Sun Cluster 3.0 software, and Elliptic Curve Cryptography libraries.

To find out what's next from this team of leading research scientists, visit the Sun Labs site.