Sun is evolving its Sun Grid Readiness Offering with the addition of a Utility Computing component to enable ISVs to port and deploy their compute-intensive applications on the Sun Grid. Already successful in arming several ISVs with the tools and resources to offer Grid-ready solutions, the Utility Computing component of the Sun Grid Readiness Offering also allows ISVs to participate in a pilot programme for hosting applications in the Sun Grid application catalog, which is expected to be included in the next Sun Grid release. The application catalogue will showcase Sun Grid applications available to customers and will be demonstrated at the GridWorld conference in the Washington DC Convention Center in the Sponsor Showcase Room, September 12-13.

"Engaging our ISV partners and building a strong developer community is critical to continued adoption of utility computing models and to building a robust catalog of applications that run on Sun Grid. Based on the success we've seen with the Sun Grid Readiness Offering and the response to the Sun Developer Community, we know ISVs and developers alike are keen to leverage the power of utility computing and the Sun Grid", stated Aisling MacRunnels, senior director of utility computing marketing, Sun Microsystems Inc. "Our tagline is 'The Network Is The Computer' and www.network.com makes that all the more real as we create this ISV application community around our Grid."

During the GridWorld 2006 conference, Sun will also host the Sun Gridathon, an interactive hands-on series of technical presentations and seminars to provide attendees focused on Grid development with information on how to port, architect, and deploy applications to a Grid environment. These scheduled events will be led by engineers and architects from the Sun Grid team, and will detail the Sun Grid Compute Utility architecture, summarize the requirements for deploying applications on the Sun grid and address topics ranging from parallelizing applications to porting to the Solaris 10 OS. The Sun Gridathon is free for GridWorld 2006 conference attendees, and qualified attendees will receive guidance from Sun engineers on porting their applications to the Sun Grid as well as free hours on Sun Grid Compute Utility.

Since its launch nearly a year ago, Developer.Network.com has grown into a community of thousands with strong representation from the high-performance computing space. The community has more than 50 public projects, including C/C++ and Java technology-based examples and open source applications ported to Sun Grid. Sun Grid provides developers with access to tools and resources to help build competency in creating and deploying applications in Grid and utility computing environments. It also provides developers with a collaborative environment for developing open source applications, including project support with version control and e-mail aliases monitored by Sun Grid engineering.