Sun Microsystems gets $44.29-mn from DARPA

SANTA CLARA, USA: Sun Microsystems Inc. today announced that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded Sun $44.29 million funding for a five-and-a-half-year research project.

The project would focus on microchip interconnectivity via on-chip optical networks enabled by Silicon photonics and proximity communication.

Part of DARPA's Ultraperformance Nanophotonic Intrachip Communication (UNIC) program, the project commences with an incremental delivery of $8.1 million to Sun Microsystems' Microelectronics and Laboratories divisions.

Building on research done under DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems program, Sun's new project will accelerate the development of lower cost, high performance and high productivity systems.

The project presents a unique opportunity to develop supercomputers through interconnecting an array of low-cost chips, with the potential to overcome the fundamental cost and performance limits of scaling up today's large computer systems.

By providing high bandwidth, low latency, and low power interconnections between the parallel computing chips in such an array, this research project will help enable a broad class of companies and organizations to utilize applications with high compute and communication requirements, such as energy exploration, biotechnology and weather modeling.

“DARPA’s UNIC program will demonstrate high performance photonic technology for high bandwidth, on-chip, photonic communications networks for advanced (10 trillion operations/second) microprocessors.

By restoring the balance between computation and communications, the program will significantly enhance DoD’s capabilities for applications such as Image Processing, Autonomous Operations, Synthetic Aperture Radar, as well as supercomputing,” said Dr Jag Shah, program manager in DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office.