Sun Microsystems recently announced that its OpenSPARC initiative has released the UltraSPARC Architecture 2005 and HyperVisor API specifications to the market, helping to jumpstart the porting of Linux, BSD and other operating systems, middleware and applications to the UltraSPARC T1 processor with CoolThreads technology.
According to Sun, the publication of these specifications will broaden the base of users who can take advantage of the performance, power and space benefits of the UltraSPARC T1 processor's massive throughput.
The documentation is available for free download at http://www.opensparc.net/.
Sun says the reasoning behind making this documentation available is to help nurture the creation of a new chip multi-threading community, and to assist companies interested in porting operating systems and other applications to the UltraSPARC T1processor's threaded environment.
Helen Constantinides, data centre and data management manager at Sun Microsystems South Africa, says: "This announcement shows that we have further opened the doors on our own innovation, allowing anyone interested to participate. It will foster new growth in the IT market and provide economic opportunity for Sun and all participants in the 'Internet of the future'.
"It means that the development community now has the information needed to port Linux to the CoolThreads architecture and to take full advantage of the chip's multi-threading capabilities," she adds.
Sharing UltraSPARC T1-based processor source code reflects Sun's continuing commitment to the open source development model and to offering customers greater choice.
"We have extended our open source movement into the IT hardware space by open-sourcing the 64-bit SPARC processor. Open-sourcing the SPARC T1 technology will provide for further collaboration and cooperation around hardware design; this is expected to help drive down the costs of implementing the design in different technologies while enabling breakthrough innovative new products to be brought to market and remove barriers for adoption," Constantinides continues.
She says that having Linux or BSD ports for the UltraSPARC T1 processor will greatly expand the SPARC market, giving customers more opportunities to reap the benefits of our CoolThreads technology. The OpenSPARC effort is fostering a community for SPARC-based, 32-thread innovation that will play a crucial role in redefining industry standards in the data centre.
For more information on OpenSPARC, please go to http://www.opensparc.net/.
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