“The desktop metaphor has been static for the last 10 years”

With ‘Project Looking Glass’, Sun wants to bring about a big change in how the desktop will look. On a recent visit to India, Lionel Lim, vice president and managing director, Asia South, Sun Microsystems, spoke to Venkatesh Ganesh on this futuristic project that Sun says will change the way applications are built

What is Project Looking Glass?

We are working on a desktop interface that is going to offer a new paradigm in traditional windowing. For the past 10 years we have seen that the utility of the desktop has been static and has not evolved substantially. Project Looking Glass enables a new way of examining the way applications should be built and secondly, how the computing world would appear when freed from having one company define the boundaries in desktop computing. Also, it will help bring to life new ways of managing data. The interface screens can be made more transparent and manipulated in 3-D. This will help in juggling a dozen or possibly more applications at once as well as to work more effectively within a single application.

Is it compatible with any existing or open source applications?

Yes, it is compatible with existing as well as open source applications. It is written in Java and designed to run on the Solaris and Linux operating systems and also to work with current desktop applications. Developers will be able to create new applications that can leverage 3-D capabilities. Our development team also intends to create a platform and APIs to benefit developers who are keen on innovating around a 3-D desktop. Our goal is to explore the design and infrastructure required for next-generation desktop products. We plan to use ‘Project Looking Glass’ technology to enhance future versions of the Sun Java Desktop System, which is based on open-source components and industry standards.

What are Sun’s views on the open-source movement, particularly Linux?

Sun has been offering Linux-based systems since August 2002. We support Red Hat and SUSE Linux, which together account for more than 50 percent of the overall Linux market. Both are available on Sun x86 hardware platforms (AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processors). Sun is extending the reach of its end-to-end infrastructure and is undertaking a systems approach. For example, in x86-based hardware, standard distributions of Linux are tightly integrated with the Sun ONE product family and the Java value-added software. Six Sun ONE products are available on Linux today.

Can you elaborate on throughput computing?

We in Sun believe that while microprocessors have been doubling in speed every 18 to 24 months, memory speeds have been developing every six years. So, Sun is looking beyond clock speeds and concentrating on the amount of work a processor completes. Net-based applications generate many software threads that can be executed in parallel, but today’s processor can run only one thread at a time. Sun is developing processors that are designed to link multiple processor cores on a single piece of silicon, with each core capable of processing multiple threads simultaneously. We call this chip multithreading and this will be able to run thousands of threads, thereby exponentially increasing the amount of data processed every second. This design can reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) considerably.

Is your tie-up with AMD a part of your low-computing strategy?

The Sun-AMD alliance combines 20 years of enterprise expertise with the industry economics of x86 to provide the best of enterprise value. In addition to this, we provide the reliability, serviceability, availability and security to mission-critical technologies. This enables us to take the cost out (for an enterprise) in the acquisition of an operating system, hardware, layered software and manages resources, thereby delivering substantial business gains. Customers can choose from the Solaris, Linux or Java platforms as their operating systems, with an option to choose 32- or 64-bit microprocessors. This collaboration intends to maximise the performance of the Java platform and tools and additionally optimise Solaris performance on AMD Opteron processors. In essence, our strategy is we are ‘microprocessor agnostic’ and we let the customer pick whatever he wants.