SoIT's News Issue 3 2009

SIT goes green with Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems and the University of Sydney are collaborating to improve computing education in multi-core technology.

School of IT Senior Lecturer Dr Bernhard Scholz says that multi-core technology is the future of computing; “The clock-speed of single-core CPUs has reached its physical limits. With the omnipresence of multi-core processors, multi-core technology education is essential and will form a base requirement in our curriculum to educate the next generation of computer engineers.’

With this in mind, Sun Microsystems recently donated a SPARC Enterprise T5120 computer server to the School. The server has two UltraSPARC T2 processors with 8 cores and 64 threads. “Building on fruitful research collaborations between the two institutions, Sun Microsystems was encouraged to extend our university involvement to student education – the researchers of the future” said Dr Cristina Cifuentes of Sun Microsystems.

Multi-core technology is consistent with reducing greenhouse gas emissions in IT. By implementing efficient parallel software for multi-core computers the energy consumption of computers can be reduced. Academic staff at the School of Information Technologies are exciting to be able to utilise this new technology in teaching.