Sun Microsystems Inc has bought Dakota Scientific Software Inc on undisclosed terms to supercharge Fortran applications running on its Solaris operating system. The 1990 Rapid City-based Cray spin-out, which has just ten employees, has been a pioneer in the application of supercomputer-based technology to more general purpose machines, but Sun says it will kill off Dakota’s Windows NT versions of its software libraries and concentrate just on Solaris. While the primary focus will be on Sparc, developments for Solaris on Intel will be continued . The Dakota unit will be relocated to Broomfield, Colorado. Sun covets customers on the recently revised list of the world’s top 500 computer sites, which is dominated by Silicon Graphics and its Cray subsidiary (CI No 3,435), and will use Dakota’s software as another tool to chip away at their lead. Moreover, within two months Sun will join a consortium known as Open MP and plans new hardware and software products designed to configure supercomputer-class configurations including additions to its clustering products. Open MP is a programming interface being supported by the major system vendors which is expected to accelerate the use of parallel programming techniques on low-cost shared memory multiprocessor systems. Sun didn’t join Open MP when it was formed by SGI and others last year (CI No 3,278), it said that due to a snafu it didn’t know that it had been invited. We would have joined had we known, it said. Sun has OEM-ed Dakota’s Fortran libraries for some time, under the Sun Performance Library name, bundling them with its own Fortran and C compilers and debugging tools. It doesn’t sound as if Dakota – also the name of CEO Scott McNealy’s second son – is too upset about its NT work being dropped. Its contact web page invites users to send legitimate mail to its server but direct spam and junk email/spam to billg@microsoft.com.
