Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced today that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded Sun $44.29 million funding for a five and a half-year research project focused on microchip interconnectivity via on-chip optical networks enabled by Silicon photonics and proximity communication. The project, part of DARPA's Ultraperformance Nanophotonic Intrachip Communication program, commences with an incremental delivery of $8.1 million to Sun Microsystems' Microelectronics and Laboratories divisions. Visit http://www.research.sun.com for more information on research projects at Sun.

Sun's new project, building on research done under DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems program, will accelerate the development of lower cost, high performance and high productivity systems. With the potential to overcome the fundamental cost and performance limits of scaling up today's large computer systems, the project presents a unique opportunity to develop supercomputers through interconnecting an array of low-cost chips. This research project will help enable a broad class of companies and organizations, by providing unprecedented high bandwidth, low latency, and low power interconnections between the parallel computing chips in such an array, to utilize applications with high compute and communication requirements, such as energy exploration, biotechnology and weather modeling.

Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer and executive vice president of research and development for Sun said: “Optical communications could be a truly game-changing technology — an elegant way to continue impressive performance gains while completely changing the economics of large-scale silicon production". “Congratulations to Sun Labs and Microelectronics teams for their constructive creativity and for driving innovation into the semiconductor marketplace."

Sun's program combines optical signaling with Proximity Communication, its key chip-to-chip I/O technology, to construct arrays of low-cost chips in a single virtual “macrochip.” Such an aggregation of inexpensive chips looks and performs like a single chip of enormous size, thus extending Moore's Law; it also avoids soldered chip connections to enable lower total system cost. Long connections across the macrochip leverage the high bandwidth, low latency, and low power of silicon optics, and through this program Sun and DARPA will research technologies to dramatically further reduce the cost of these optical connections. The result is a virtual supercomputer.