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In 1991, Sun Microsystems created Sun Microsystems Laboratories with the express purpose of solving difficult technical problems brought to Sun by customers. Over the years, the results have been impressive. (See sidebar for more details.) In the fall of 2003, Glenn Edens was named Senior Vice President and Director of Sun Labs. Edens himself has an inspiring record of technological innovation. In 1979, he co-founded Grid Systems Corporation, the company that developed the first laptop computer. He also founded WaveFrame Corporation in 1985, which developed the first all-digital audio workstations for the motion picture, television, and recording industries. From 1992 to 1998, Edens managed the transfer of research results into external product companies at Interval Research Corporation. From 1998 to 2001 he was president of AT&T Strategic Ventures, while also serving as VP of Broadband Technology there. From 2001 to 2003 he was Vice President for Strategic Technology at Hewlett-Packard. We met with him to learn about the direction he is taking Sun Labs.
The Java platform is a very robust franchise. It's a marketplace. It's a community. It's a programming tool. So we ask questions: What are the alternatives? How do we make the Java runtime smaller? How do we make it faster? How would we change the memory model for the hardware? We're looking at different versions of virtual machine and garbage collection technology. Sometimes in research experiments, we'll change a language feature and experiment with it. And the jury's out as to whether those will ever be significant enough to then launch a JSR process. If you look at the history of programming languages, they don't last forever, because the technology changes, programming styles change, and the good languages last 15 or 20 years.
So, I would bet money that no matter what happens, whether Sun Labs existed or not, 10 years from now, the Java language will look different than it does today. Humans are really interesting, because we love to build tools, and we learn from that prior building experience to build better tools. So, it's conceivable to me that the Labs could develop an interesting alternative that would be commercially successful. At this point, we're really working in two main areas: How do we make current Java implementations better and how do we make them smaller and faster? One area of current research explores the link between a Java type object-oriented work load and hardware. In the Labs, the real exciting work isn't about instruction sets. It's about the memory model. So, we have projects like Mayhem and Barcelona, which we don't talk about much, where we're working hard to construct hardware and system software differently. So we're looking at different run time environments. If a large bank or a large customer's main workload is a Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition workload, then there's a good chance we could design computers differently to run those workloads better. We also have a project code-named Squawk, in which we're working on a very compact, high performance Java environment written entirely in the Java language. We're also interested in offering developers in the device world a complete Java stack that doesn't require integration with numerous other system software vendors. Running but not Managing Sun Labs
A research lab tends to consist of hippies, and hippies just ask why. Why, why, why. Why do I have to do it this way? Why should I do that? Why do I need to fill out this form? Why do I have to -- anything. Everything is a question. There is nothing that happens here without an argument. But that's part of our robust culture, and it's the "why" versus the "how". The reason I get in trouble with that analogy is, of course, there are very good engineers in the labs, and there are very good hippies in the product groups. When managing a set of independent people, you can't tell them what to do. There are only three areas that I directly affect: First, I have some control over the people we hire. Second, I can present questions we ask, bringing in customers, suggesting something to discuss in Sun's Executive Management Group. And third, I can decide what to fund. But that's about it. That's why I say that you can run Sun Labs, but you can't manage it. Five Kinds of Projects at Sun Labs
Advanced development, the next category, is something we do rarely. But sometimes a business unit will ask us to solve a problem, and we'll take it all the way to a releasable state. That's an expensive proposition for the labs. However, we're taking the Honeycomb project, an integrated storage and server project, very far through this process. The vision projects are the core of what we do, and we do some interesting things in this area. Each researcher has a project that they pick by themselves and work on for some part of Fridays. They can work on anything they want. The only rule is they have to publish some results. But they get to pick how they spend Friday. Then we have our regular vision research projects, which are funded and evaluated, and we review them and nurture them through to hopefully get transferred to business units. That's probably more than 60% of what we do.
Finally, we have the community projects. And those are everything from open source work to patents, which eventually become public when they get issued. Community projects include chairing conferences, being on program committees, speaking, publishing technical reports and papers. We try to be very interactive with other universities and other conferences, and I think that really helps get that two-way information flow going. Moving Data at 60 to 100 Times Current Speeds
Knowing Customers
At Sun Labs, we work hard to make sure that our research staff is grounded in what's happening in the world. What's happening in pop culture? What are kids doing? What's this IM and learning to type with your thumbs about? Because kids, artists, and renegades are going to define how the technology gets used going forward. We bring in speakers and projects and work with other research labs. We work with schools. We bring in a lot of customers. We make sure that for the areas we're working in, we know as much as we can about what other labs are doing and what people's perceived problems are, because they can rarely articulate their real problems. So, a customer might say, "I'm spending too much money on IT." Well, what does that really mean? Does that mean that the money they're spending is not effective? Or does it really mean that it's effective, but they want to spend less? Do they believe it can be cheaper? Is it really a service problem? You have to decompose that. But at the end of the day, the spark of innovation still comes from someone asking, "Why, why, why, why, why? Why do I have to do it that way? Why is this done this way?" And you cannot replace that spark with any automated or procedural mechanism. It just has never happened. Now, maybe someone will eventually stumble onto the science to "make" innovation occur, which would be quite interesting. What you can do is equip your research lab with as much intelligence, creativity, and knowledge about what's happening in the world as you can. And the more you do that, the more relevant the solutions are going to be. See Also
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