Universities and higher education institutions across Canada are choosing Sun technology and Linux operating systemes to bolster research and development on their campuses, the manufacturer reports, including office productivity software, servers running Solaris and Linux operating environments, and storage systems.

"Sun treasures its strong relationships with Canada's academic institutions because we share a common interest in the relentless quest for innovation," said Stéphane Boisvert, president of Sun Microsystems of Canada, Inc. "Schools have always shared our belief in research and development, and are increasingly responding to the market leading price and performance of our technology by buying Sun in ever greater numbers. "

Continuing its mandate of furthering Canada's academic research and development communities, Sun has been chosen as a strategic partner and the technology vendor of choice by many post-secondary institutions across the country. As well, the company has donated more than a million dollars in funding to key research programs and Academic Equipment Grants to educational institutinos in Canada.

Sun has won several important clients recently, including:

University of Alberta
TAPoR, the Text Analysis Portal for Research at the University of Alberta, has chosen Sun servers and storage to power their portal for text-based computing research in the Faculty of Arts. Text analysis places significant demands on computer resources as researchers study the ways text can be exploited to discover new knowledge, research that is relevant to the language industries, such as translation services, word-processing companies, software producers, and language instruction firms.TAPoR will use a cluster of Sun FireV60 and V65x servers running Red hat Llinux and a Sun StorEdge (TM) 6120 array^.

École Polytechnique, University of Montreal
Sun is closely involved with two exciting projects at the University of Montreal's École Polytechnique. Firstly, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering's Poly-Grames Research Center for the Study of Advanced Microwave and Spatial Electronics needed to improve its network infrastructure and increase data collection capacity with a small SAN, while working within a limited budget. The Department chose Sun as a technology provider, implementation partner and training advisor, investing in a Sun FireTM V480 server running the Solaris operating environment, a StorEdgeTM E3510 Array, and a StorEdge L25 tape library back-up system Running SolsticeTM back-up software.

Secondly, Sun also helped the Department of Biomedical Engineering develop the server architecture for the development of new medical imaging models. The Department chose a Sun Fire V480 workgroup server for its data-intensive computations, supported by a storage area network built on a StorEdge 3510 array with 1.7TB capacity, and a StorEdge L25 tape library back-up system with Veritas Net-backup software. SunService will provide installation services for the hardware and three years of support services.

McGill University
The McGill Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences needed significant storage capacity to support the study of petroleum industry seismic data at the McGill Subsurface Research Laboratory. The Department, already equipped with Sun servers running Solaris, chose a StorEdge E3510 array with 1.7TB capacity, a StorEdge L25 tape library back-up system with Veritas Net-backup software, and SunService installation and three years of support services. One of the keys to choosing Sun is its interoperability with a key seismic analysis application from Landmark Graphics Corporation.

St. Francis Xavier University
The Department of Physics at St. Francis Xavier University chose Sun technology as the foundation of the university's high-performance computing environment, built to support researchers' scientific modeling experiments. The School is creating a 61-node compute grid, built on Sun Fire V60x and V65x servers running Red Hat Linux.

About Sun Microsystems of Canada Inc.
Sun Microsystems of Canada Inc., a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, Inc., is headquartered in Markham, Ontario. The company, which employs more than 550 persons, has offices in Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver and Victoria. Sun products and services are also available through Sun Authorized Independent Sales Organizations and iForce(SM) System Providers across Canada. For more information, visit http://ca.sun.com.