SUNW: Sun Grid Compute Utility Infrastructure Delivers Cost Savings and Flexibility for Electronic Design Automation

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW) today announced that AMD selected the Sun Grid Compute Utility for processor design and simulation to decrease time-to-market for new products, avoid costly infrastructure additions and gain more flexibility in scheduling testing during peak production cycles. The Sun Grid Compute Utility, available at http://www.network.com , delivers affordable, easy and secure access to high-performance computing resources on a pay-for-use basis for $1/CPU-hour. Leveraging the Sun Grid Compute Utility for electronic design provides AMD with an additional tool for making efficient use of compute resources and continuing to deliver reliable products on time.


As part of its design and manufacturing process, AMD puts its integrated circuits through a rigorous, compute-intensive simulation testing to ensure compliance with the most stringent requirements. Rather than purchase additional infrastructure to conduct processor simulations, AMD opted instead to turn to a trusted industry partner company Sun Microsystems. Although AMD has its own powerful internal grid on which to run product performance simulations, leveraging the Sun Grid Compute Utility delivered attractive benefits by providing access to additional, variable capacity as AMD's production cycle demanded. In addition, because the Sun Grid is powered by Sun Fire servers based on AMD's Opteron processors, the company was confident that the performance of this platform would compare to that of AMD's own internal grid.

"For AMD, the Sun Grid provides the variable capacity we need to help shorten our production cycles and ensure that no part of testing or development is delayed or compromised because of a lack of compute power," said Mike Lowe, director, Silicon Design Engineering, AMD. "The Sun Grid is a great tool in our arsenal."

"The Sun Grid Compute Utility gives customers of all sizes access to the infrastructure needed to power through the most compute intensive demands of their businesses," said Aisling MacRunnels, senior director, utility computing marketing, Sun Microsystems. "AMD's use of the Sun Grid is a clear indicator of increasing traction in the enterprise for not only the utility computing vision, but also for real world use."

The Sun Grid Compute Utility leverages the power of the Solaris Operating System (OS) and the power of AMD Opteron processors, delivering top performance, scalability, power efficiency, manageability, and longevity benefits for the Sun Grid architecture. Moving forward, Sun and AMD will continue to validate their shared vision for grid-based utility computing through extended cooperation. The companies are committed to developing intellectual property that will drive grid computing innovations and to highlighting the value of a Sun and AMD grid solution for enterprises.

For more information about the Sun Grid Compute Utility, visit http://www.network.com/