The University of Otago has become the first university outside of the United States to be selected as a Sun Microsystems OpenSPARC Centre of Excellence.
The OpenSPARC (scalable processor architecture) project involves a global network of researchers, industry representatives and Sun executives working on collaborative projects to deliver more powerful computers. OpenSPARC focuses on the development of both hardware and software to meet rapidly-growing demand for multi-core processors.
Otago computer science researcher Dr Zhiyi Huang and information science head professor Martin Purvis are part of the Otago team working on several projects of interest to Sun Microsystems, the most high-profile being the Virtual Aggregated Processor, or VAP. VAP is based on building virtualisation software to utilise the power of the new generation multi-core computer chips.
Otago joins the University of California, University of Texas, University of Michigan, University of Illinois, Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University.