MARKHAM, ONT. -- November 1, 2001 - Sun Microsystems of Canada Inc. today announced that Sun Fire servers have been selected to power the new High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory (HPCVL), a collaborative initiative of Carleton University, University of Ottawa, Queen's University, and Royal Military College of Canada. The Sun Fire 6800 server currently delivers mainframe-class capabilities to the desktops of Canadian researchers conducting innovative research and development in a variety of disciplines. The Sun Fire Midframe servers are deployed in a cluster grid, managed by Sun Grid Engine software and accessible through a web-based portal which provides researchers access to the highly reliable, available and scalable resources in a secure, high performance computing environment.

"Equipping our scientists and researchers with much sought after computing resources is paramount to Canada's ability to both retain and attract top talent in today's challenging economic environment, noted Everett Anstey, president of Sun Microsystems of Canada Inc. "Sun Microsystems is proud of the role it and Sun technologies are playing at HPCVL. Effective collaboration between the public and private sectors is critical to Canada's success in the global competitive marketplace."

"The HPCVL venture illustrates the underlying principles behind Sun's founding vision, 'The Network Is The Computer' " noted Bill Joy, chief scientist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Inc. "Researchers are utilizing the resources of a high performance computing network environment directly from their desktops. With its choice of a powerful combination of Sun Fire and Grid Engine technologies, HPCVL takes supercomputing to new heights."

Today, the initial cluster of four Sun Fire 6800 servers, each with 24 UltraSPARC III processors running the robust Solaris 8 Operating Environment, and 3.9 Terabytes of Sun StorEdge disk arrays are deployed at the HPCVL facility located at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. The current Sun environment at HPCVL offers 144 GFLOPS Theoretical Peak Performance (TPP).

Sun Grid Engine software permits researchers to leverage the combined available resources of the HPCVL network infrastructure, thus freeing time for researchers to focus on their projects, not the computing tasks. Sun Grid Engine software, a powerful Distributed Resource Management (DRM) tool, plays a key role in the HPCVL environment to aggregate and maximize the utilization of available resources. Sun Grid Engine software helps deliver computer power as a network service to the individual desktops of HPCVL users.

"The secure virtual research environment that HPCVL is creating using the Sun hardware and software environment offers researchers maximum flexibility and capability," stated Dr. Ken Edgecombe, Executive Director, HPCVL. "This is an enormously powerful research environment right at their fingertips no matter where they are."

As the leading private sector supporter of HPCVL, Sun Microsystems will also establish fifteen fellowships per year for 4 years as part of its overall commitment to the high performance computing initiative. The fellowships will be available to researchers and faculty at the four universities.

Researchers at HPCVL member institutions and selected researchers at other Ontario institutions are utilizing the HPCVL environment to conduct research in a wide variety of disciplines within engineering, medicine, social sciences and the humanities. High Performance Computing resources are facilitating the research in such areas as Computer Aided Molecular Design (CAMD)/Computational Chemistry, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Polymer Science, Applied Parallel Computing, Econometrics, Psychology, and Bioinformatics.

"High performance computing is the key to a myriad of present and future problems from exploring space to eradicating disease and hunger," said Gaylen Duncan, President and CEO of ITAC, the Information Technology Association of Canada. "HPCVL ensures that Canadian researchers and scientists have access to state-of-the-art tools to help solve some of the big problems confronting humanity".

Stantive Solutions, Inc., the Sun Authorized Independent Marketing Organization (IMO) for Eastern Ontario, has played an instrumental role at HPCVL to enable the successful implementation of the high performance computing platform. The Sun IMO is also providing onsite technical support to HPCVL.

A recent report published by IDC (International Data Corporation) noted that Sun Microsystems' share of the high performance computing market grew from four percent in 1996 to 20 percent in 2000 representing an approximate 500 percent increase. As traditional supercomputing facilities and a new broader audience look to utilize the power of microprocessor-based, supercomputing resources, Sun is uniquely positioned to help accelerate its adoption.

For information on HPCVL, visit http://www.hpcvl.org.

About Sun Fire Midframe Servers
The Sun Fire Midframe family of servers have redefined what it means to be a datacenter server, bringing mainframe-class capabilities to the midrange. Spanning the education, retail, life sciences and other vertical markets, the UltraSPARC III technology based Sun Midframe server family - comprising the Sun Fire 3800, Sun Fire 4800, Sun Fire 4810 and the Sun Fire 6800 - addresses the needs of customers across both small and large enterprises. Sun Fire servers feature hot-pluggable components, remote monitoring and CPU power control, and alternate pathing. From supporting smaller Internet applications to enabling server consolidation and data warehousing, the record-setting Sun Midframe servers capture real world-record benchmarks including the PeopleSoft 8 General Ledger, Oracle Apps Benchmark and PeopleSoft Financials.

Sun In Education

Sun is a leading provider of open network computing solutions to colleges and universities around the world, powering academic, research and high performance computing systems, campus administration, digital libraries and student instruction systems. In addition, Sun is committed to connecting the world's students to the Internet, beginning with primary and secondary schools and extending to all levels of higher education. For information about Sun in Education, please visit http://www.sun.com/edu.

About Sun Microsystems of Canada Inc.

Sun Microsystems of Canada Inc., a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, Inc., is headquartered in Markham, Ontario, with branch offices in Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary, Vancouver and Victoria. Sun products and services are also available through independent marketing offices in St. John's, Saint John, Halifax, Quebec City, Calgary, Montreal, London, Toronto, Kingston, Winnipeg, Edmonton and Vancouver, as well as through iForce System Providers across Canada. For more information, visit http://www.sun.ca

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that power the Internet and allow companies worldwide to take their businesses to the nth. Sun can be found in more than 170 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://www.sun.com

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Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Sun Fire, Solaris, Sun StorEdge, iForce and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the US and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc.