The Biggest Impact Is People

The products and technologies resulting from Sun Labs projects are only the most obvious examples of its impact. Equally important is the influence of its people.

Sun Labs has on its staff some of the most respected names in the world of technology, including (to name just a few):

• Dr. Whitfield Diffie, a Sun Distinguished Engineer, co-originated the concept of public-key cryptography that underlies Internet security. For the past decade, he has struggled for individual and commercial freedom to use cryptography and is the author, together with Dr. Susan Landau, of the book "Privacy on the Line." Dr. Diffie is a Fellow of the Marconi Foundation and his work has been the subject of recent books and television documentaries.
  
• Dr. James Gosling, the original designer of the Java™ programming language. Dr. Gosling has also built satellite data acquisition systems, a multiprocessor version of UNIX®, compilers, mail systems, and window managers. He is currently working on advanced Java development tools at Sun Labs.
  
• Dr. Steve Heller, the Principal Investigator for the Java Technology Research Group, which focuses on issues of high-performing and scalable JVMs, especially garbage collection. Steve also works on network routing and topologies for fast communication. After getting his doctorate from MIT, Steve designed high-performance communication algorithms for Thinking Machines Corporation's CM-2 and CM-5 massively parallel supercomputers, using "all the wires, all the time."
  
• Dr. Robert Sproull, Director of Sun Labs Massachusetts and a Sun Fellow and Vice President. Dr. Sproull has developed hardware and software for graphics displays and printers. He has collaborated with Dr. Ivan Sutherland in VLSI design techniques and asynchronous systems design. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has served on the U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board.
  
• Dr. Guy Steele, a Sun Distinguished Engineer, co-authored the definitive specification of the Java programming language. He also co-designed the programming languages Scheme, Common Lisp, C*, CM Lisp, and High Performance Fortran. He is an ACM Fellow, an AAAI Fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He has received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award, and a Gordon Bell Prize. He is currently researching improvements in storage management, process synchronization, and floating-point arithmetic.
  
• Dr. Ivan Sutherland, Vice President and Fellow of Sun Microsystems. Dr. Sutherland was a co-founder of Evans and Sutherland, which created some of the earliest and most advanced computer graphics systems. He is a member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, received the highly prestigious ACM Turing Award in 1988, and holds several honorary degrees.
  
• Dr. Dave Ungar, a Sun Distinguished Engineer, has been researching object-oriented programming languages, environments, and implementation techniques for 20 years. The techniques developed by him and his research group, including Generation Scavenging, direct pointers in object heaps, customization of compiled code, and transparent adaptive optimization, have found wide acceptance in object-oriented systems such as Sun's Java HotSpot™ performance engine, Java KVM technology for mobile and embedded devices, and other Java and Smalltalk virtual machines.
  

One example is Dr. Yousef Khalidi, who led the development of Sun™ Cluster 3.0 software, first as a Sun Labs project and then within a Sun product group. (Dr. Khalidi is a Distinguished Engineer, and is Chief Architect and CTO for Solaris™ Operating Environment. He has worked on several Sun Labs research projects including Solaris MC and Spring systems, and is currently working on a next generation network architecture.) In the case of Sun Cluster 3.0 software, the original development work was done under the auspices of Sun Labs, and the entire Sun Labs team then transferred with Dr. Khalidi to a Sun product division to see the technology through to product development. Along the way, Dr. Khalidi played every conceivable role, from project manager to evangelist to code writer to recruiter to psychotherapist. "Anything to keep it moving forward," he said. "We believed in the technology. It was a quest. We knew we had something that would make a difference."

Others carry the lessons learned at Sun Labs to future pursuits in Sun product divisions, and some even bring their product group experiences back to benefit Sun Labs. For example, Gary Lauterbach, a Sun Distinguished Engineer, worked on advanced processor technologies at Sun Labs, spent time working directly for a Sun product group, then returned to the Labs for another tour of duty. And engineers from the product divisions team up with Sun Labs on an ad hoc basis, contributing expertise, knowledge, and time whenever and however they can.

Sun Labs also recognizes the importance of collaboration in technological exploration, and can be very creative about how it uses its network of contacts both within and outside Sun. For example, a research group from Russia made significant contributions to Java technology development in the early 1990s. "We have a web of connections at universities and other research institutions all around the world," said Dr. Mitchell, "so we'll often know who is working on a particular technology from a fundamental development standpoint. We have been able to bring those pioneering researchers to Sun Labs on a temporary basis, on leave or sabbatical, or convince a trail-blazing professor to join us as a Sun employee."

«Return to feature story