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. 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 of Silicon Design Engineering at 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 of utility computing marketing at 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."

Sun is evolving its Sun Grid Readiness Offering with the addition of a utility computing component to enable ISVs to port and deploy their compute-intensive applications on the Sun Grid. Already successful in arming several ISVs with the tools and resources to offer Grid-ready solutions, the utility computing component of the Sun Grid Readiness Offering also allows ISVs to participate in a pilot program for hosting applications in the Sun Grid application catalog, which is expected to be included in the next Sun Grid release. The application catalog will showcase Sun Grid applications available to customers and will be demonstrated Sept. 12-13 at the GridWorld conference.

During the GridWorld 2006 conference, Sun will also host the Sun Gridathon, an interactive hands-on series of technical presentations and seminars to provide attendees focused on grid development with information on how to port, architect and deploy applications to a Grid environment. These scheduled events will be led by engineers and architects from the Sun Grid team, and will detail the Sun Grid Compute Utility architecture, summarize the requirements for deploying applications on the Sun grid and address topics ranging from parallelizing applications to porting to the Solaris 10 OS. The Sun Gridathon is free for GridWorld 2006 conference attendees, and qualified attendees will receive guidance from Sun engineers on porting their applications to the Sun Grid as well as free hours on Sun Grid Compute Utility.

Since its launch nearly a year ago, the Sun Grid Developer Community (Developer.Network.com) has grown into a community of thousands with strong representation from the high-performance computing space. The community has more than 50 public projects, including C/C++ and Java technology-based examples and open source applications ported to Sun Grid. Sun Grid provides developers with access to tools and resources to help build competency in creating and deploying applications in Grid and utility computing environments. It also provides developers with a collaborative environment for developing open source applications, including project support with version control and e-mail aliases monitored by Sun Grid engineering.
 
Further leveraging the power of community and reinforcing its commitment to open source, Sun will solicit feedback from developers and end users on the open source applications they would like to see available on Sun Grid. Sun plans to include the feedback to drive programs to promote open source development in the Sun Grid Developer community. More information on Sun's effort to secure feedback from the Sun Grid Developer community is available at www.sun.com/sungrid/requestapp.

More information about the Sun Grid Developer community is available at http://developer.network.com.