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
.