By John Abbott at JavaOne
Sun Microsystems Inc’s Microelectronics division is working on a new architecture to support future immersive media applications. The project has been funded by Sun for the last few years, Sun’s chief scientist Bill Joy told ComputerWire yesterday, but an official announcement is now being prepared for later this year.
According to Joy, conventional systems architectures are not appropriate for media-rich applications such as interactive entertainment and real-time streaming, or for supporting meda-rich thin clients. Joy, one of the founders of Sun and now based at the company’s research labs in Colorado, has been working on an architecture which uses massively parallel, multiple CPUs built on a single die as a system-on-a-chip. He described the approach as a simple, step and repeat architecture using high clock rate multiple functional units, as cheap and as small as possible. We’ve done one of these designs, but aren’t ready to announce it yet said Joy.
Such an architecture, relying on loosely coupled parallelism rather than the coherent, single system architectures uses in Sun’s high-end parallel server systems, would require a massively parallel software layer to provide a programming model along the lines of the MPI message passing interface which Sun already supports. Joy is also talking about using advanced programming techniques such as numerical programming and interval arithmetic to support the architecture. The accuracy of the results from a numerical programming computation can depend on the input, and interval arithmetic provides a way of calculating whether or not the answer is the correct one. Joy referred to Stanford University’s KIF Knowledge Interchange Format rules-based logic language as the holy grail of this type of approach, but said Sun was looking to implement something simpler and more practical.
Sun Microelectronics spokesman Fadi Azhari confirmed the existence of the project as a third prong in the division’s strategy. He styled the Sparc CPU business as quality of service, picoJava cores as quality of convenience and the new, un-named project as quality of experience. Azhari wouldn’t comment on whether Sun’s primary focus would be on silicon, systems or software, but said that Sun would be working with a number of partners on the announcement.
