PITTSBURGH, SUPERCOMPUTING 2004 CONFERENCE - November 8, 2004 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW) announced today that the Sun Fire V40z server has achieved world record result on SPEC OMPM2001, a key benchmark that is used to compare the performance of shared memory servers on scientific applications. It represents a collection of applications that are used in high-energy physics, weather modeling, computational chemistry, mechanical design and several others. The Sun Fire V40z server, configured with four AMD Opteron(TM) processors Model 850 achieved a SPEC OMPM2001 result of 8,694 using the AMD Opteron processor-based compiler suite from The Portland Group (PGI) to build the OpenMP parallel applications used in this benchmarking.

This result is a new world record and eclipses previous results produced by comparably configured systems from IBM and HP in a 4 CPU (4-thread category) (1), further demonstrating the Sun Fire V40z server's superiority on performance oriented scientific and engineering applications.

The SPEC OMPM2001 benchmark is a test of the performance of 11 High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. All C/C++ and FORTRAN applications in this suite use the OpenMP programming model that provides a portable, scalable model for developing parallel applications for platforms ranging from desktop systems to supercomputers.

SPEC OMP is a stressful benchmark in terms of the required OpenMP support and the need for full 64-bit computing capability. It is widely used to measure effectiveness of SMP servers for 64-bit single-job capability computing. For customers with workloads that include OpenMP parallel applications or industrial applications parallelized using OpenMP, the Sun Fire V40z server, together with the FORTRAN, C and C++ compilers and development tools from The Portland Group, presents a compelling new solution. The price conscious customers will find that Sun Fire V40z server is not only a price performance leader, but also the performance leader in the HPTC market where 4-processor servers are widely used in applications ranging from MCAE and automotive crash testing to online transaction processing.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://sun.com

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(1) The Sun Fire V40z, running SUSE Linux 9, produced SPECompMpeak2001 score of 8,694. SPEC and the benchmark name SPEC OMP are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Comparison is based upon SPECompM2001 benchmark results for 4 processor (4 thread) systems published on www.spec.org as of November 8, 2004. For the latest SPEC OMP benchmark results, visit http://www.spec.org/omp/results.