Sun Microsystems and Europractice have started a three-year collaboration to widen the use of  the OpenSPARC CMT open sourced multi-core, multithreaded processor architecture particularly in European universities.

“We believe access to this technology will help boost Europe’s capabilities in teaching and research in the microprocessor field,” said Dr. John McLean, Head of Europractice Software Service.

Europractice is a European Union-backed non-profit microelectronics design stimulation project managed by the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

Intended to strengthen the open source community and further next-generation multi-core, multithreading development, both the OpenSPARC(TM) T1 and OpenSPARC(TM) T2 processor register transfer level (RTL) files can be downloaded at www.opensparc.net.

Sun and Europractice will hold the first in a series of OpenSPARC technology workshops this autumn. 

“Our collaboration with Europractice will help open doors for tens of thousands of advanced engineering students and next-generation technology leaders across Europe,” said Lin Lee, v-p of global communities, Sun Microsystems.

Sun first introduced the UltraSPARC T1 processor, an eight-core, 32-thread, general purpose processors in 2005.

Then in 2007, it introduced the second generation of CMT processors, the UltraSPARC T2, which doubled the thread count of the UltraSPARC T1, to 64.

The guide, designed to simplify a variety of complex OpenSPARC programming tasks is available for download

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