|
|
Fiscal 1994 Project Portfolio Report
This annual report, the third for Sun Microsystems Laboratories, is presented to promote your awareness, understanding, and appreciation of the Lab's
technical program. FY94 has been a year of rebuilding after the transfers of the Lab's Spring and SPARC groups to product development organizations as the Fiscal Year began. Approximately forty percent of the Lab's technical staff emigrated as these two groups shifted to pursue their technology in closer proximity to product development. We have missed our alumnae and appreciate their continued
work toward products.
I am pleased to report that the Lab has established Networking as a new area of
emphasis for the immediate future. We have made considerable progress, as
reported in the body of this document, on new high-performance network
infrastructure, utilizing the fiber installed in our building. This new research project is exploring issues of performance, management, economics, operations,
and applications principally in the emerging technology of Asynchronous
Transport Mode (ATM) networks.
The WinServer concept brings a new dimension of heterogeneous computing to
Sun's product line. We have developed a seamless coupling of Solaris(R), MS-
Windows(TM), and Macintosh(R) software. This Lab project is emigrating in FY95.
The ongoing projects also have made considerable progress. The PrimaVera research project on software testing, partially supported by the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), is receiving international attention. Our Lab group in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, although small, has reached critical mass and is advancing well on its program agenda.
I would like to mention a few of the modest, activities in the Lab that support
many different aspects of Sun's organizations. Activities like these, while not
particularly flashy, contribute importantly and steadily to the value Sun derives from its corporate research Lab.
- The Lab hosted the Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation (SMCC) team
that developed Sun's World Cup Video Service. The Lab's ATM expertise
and working ATM infrastructure was used by the development team who
resided and worked with their equipment in the Lab building for several
months before the start of the World Cup soccer games. Lab ATM experts and
equipment were a resource for solving many problems with this emerging
high-bandwidth technology. The resulting World Cup information services
were heavily used during the month of the games.
- Mosaic has infected Sun as a contemporary information access phenomena
of the Internet. Sun has created an externally accessible information base for
Internet users as a public marketing and product information source. The
Lab's multi-media conference room was used regularly by the cross-planetary team developing Sun's Mosaic pages because it is the only facility on the
Mountain View campus where the team could work together on-line to
design the Mosaic pages with our big-screen projection SPARCstation(TM)
display. SML staff also assisted Information Resources with techniques for
managing and minimizing the load placed on the Sun Wide Area Network
(SWAN) by Mosaic use. Lab staff in our Chelmsford office helped
SunExpress(TM) develop their Mosaic presentations.
- Sun was honored to have Mary Whitton elected as Chair of ACM's
SIGGRAPH professional special interest group. During her two-year tenure in
this position, the Lab has provided support, enabling her to devote
special attention to this important professional organization.
- The Lab, since its inception, has had a program of staff visits to customer premises as a way of developing our understanding of, and respect for,
customer requirements and values. This past year, in a reverse twist, we
hosted a sabbatical by one of Sun's System Engineers - Mark Zaremsky from
the Pittsburgh sales office. Mark worked in the ATM group on advanced
video and ATM management software. We learned a lot from Mark's
customer perspectives and in return infected him with contemporary
knowledge about the latest ATM technology. We hear that Mark has been
busily spreading this knowledge to colleagues and customers now that he
has returned to Pittsburgh. We hope to make such sabbaticals a regular part
of our activities.
- Finally, we export to Sun some of our internal processes. Lab modifications
to the Performance Appraisal process, forms, and collateral have been given
to Human Relations. Our technical information clearance process for protecting Sun's intellectual property is being adopted for use throughout the company by the corporate security group. Plans to put this system on-line are underway.
These few examples illustrate some of the ways that the Lab can assist our
corporate sponsor. I am very proud of the large, and especially the many small
ways in which the Lab staff serves Sun.
The most exciting achievements for the Lab are the new people who have joined
us. From within Sun, eighteen new staff have joined the Lab, some of them returnees from projects that emigrated in prior years. From outside, we have recruited Israel Cidon and John Ousterhout, both respected technologists who will lead new Lab activities. In FY95, we will once again temporarily reach a full staff complement, recognizing full well that further moves to product status and organization await some of the Labs' projects.
A few statistics about SML may be illuminating. As of June 30, 1994 we number 121 people located in Mountain View, California and in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. Ties with Academia are evidenced by five academic consultants. SML has a Technical Advisory Board comprised of:
- Mr. William G. Howard, Jr., Consultant
Former Director of Research, Motorola, Inc.
- Mr. Gordon Bell, Consultant
Former Vice President of Engineering, Digital Equipment Corporation
- Dr. Charles Hutchinson, Dean
Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College
- Dr. James H. Morris, Dean
Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University
The network infrastructure for Building 29 in Mountain View supports a working environment of over 180 SPARCstations and a variety of PCs and Macs, nineteen fileservers, video teleconferencing facilities, and a dial-in facility. To provide the flexibility required by the environment, each staff work area is outfitted with three UTP (Cat5) drops and two fiber optic drops--one each of single and multi-mode. The network is primarily ether-based running TCP/IP. However, FY94 marked the beginning of our ATM implementation and approximately ten percent of the workstations are now connected to the net via ATM Sbus cards. Also implemented within the SML network, is a server that supports heterogenous computing research providing network services to the SPARC, PC and Mac clients via a SPARC-based server. In support of networking activities that require unique and sometimes open networking environments, we implemented a second network within SML, the OpenNet, which is stand-alone, connected to the Internet, and apart from the SWAN. It is to the OpenNet that the ATM network trials, in which we are a participant, are terminated. This includes a 155mb line as part of the BagNet (Pacific Bell) trial and a 622mb line for the BMan (Sprint) trial.
We dedicate this report to those former SML members who have moved, with
their expertise, into other parts of Sun carrying with them the knowledge and
skill they developed here. We are proud of their accomplishments and grateful
for their forthcoming roles in sharing their results with others at Sun in a
personal and proactive way.
William R. (Bert) Sutherland
Director, Sun Microsystems Laboratories
Vice President, Sun Microsystems Inc.
bert.sutherland@Eng.Sun.com
|
