| Sun Microsystems (Mountain View, CA) has hired 33 top
Russian computer scientists, including supercomputer
designer Boris Babaian, to write compilers and other
development tools for Sun Sparcstations. Working under
exclusive contracts at three locations in their home
country, the Russians will apply their knowledge of
multiprocessing architectures to a new generation of
Pascal and FORTRAN compilers and optimization tools. "We think this can be a precedent for other research-and-development-intensive companies," said Scott McNealy, president, CEO, and chairman of Sun Microsystems. Babaian, a longstanding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, is known as the "Seymour Cray of the Russian computer industry." He was the principal architect of the Elbrus-3 supercomputer, which was reputed to be three times faster than a Cray Y-MP, the fastest U.S. supercomputer. The 16-processor Elbrus-3 uses an architecture known as fine-grain parallelism to achieve its high performance. In the 1970s, Soviet computer designers pioneered multiprocessing architectures to overcome the limitations of their slower processors, and their long experience in writing software for those architectures is what attracted Sun's attention. Sun first contacted the Russians in 1990. Negotiations were delayed by legal barriers and the deepening political turmoil in the crumbling Soviet Union. In March, Sun formed the Moscow Center of SPARC Technology and contracted with Babaian for basic research. The latest agreement goes far beyond that by integrating the Russians into Sun's U.S.-based development efforts. It's a rare example of a Western company employing Russians to produce high-technology commercial products. The Moscow team will focus on the Sparcompiler Optimizer, a performance-enhancing tool for SPARC applications. Two other teams in St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) and Novosibirsk (Russian Siberia) will work on the Sparcompiler FORTRAN and Sparcompiler Pascal products sold by SunPro (Mountain View, CA), the software development arm of Sun. The projects are scheduled for completion in 12 to 18 months. Trade restrictions left over from Cold War days made the alliance difficult to cement. Sun will equip the Russians with workstations, but it is forbidden to provide machines more powerful than a Sparcstation 1+. Ironically, if current restrictions are not lifted, the Russians won't be allowed to buy the finished software they help develop, said Jon Kannegaard, SunPro's vice president and general manager. Copyright 1994-1997 BYTE |