Sun launches Solaris University Challenge

Sun Microsystems India, on Wednesday announced the Solaris University Challenge, offering students from around the world cash and prizes for developing their projects on the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) and OpenSolaris, Sun's open source project for Solaris developers.

The competition is open to undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and IT staff of accreditated universities in select participating countries and the last date for submission of projects is June 30.

The competition is being launched simultaneously in India, US, UK, Canada, Germany, China, Brazil and Singapore.

Participants in the challenge are encouraged to leverage Sun's $500 million research and development investment in operating systems to create innovative projects in, with or on the Solaris 10 and OpenSource Operating Systems, said Kim Jones, vice president, global education and research, Sun Microsystems.

Announcing the competition at a press conference, here, she said: "With OpenSolaris we have enabled students from around the world to share in the collective work of the most innovative engineers on the planet."

The winner will receive cash and Sun technology for themselves and up to $100,000 in technology for the associated university.

One individual or one team of up to four individuals from the same university will be awarded the grand prize "" $5,000 prize purse per individual, plus a Sun Ultra 20 Workstation.

The winner's university will receive a credit with a retail value of $100,000 towards the purchase of Sun Microsystems products including Sun Fire x64 servers and UltraSPARC(R) processor-based systems, to help the campus expand its technology.

"The University Challenge encourages students to capitalise on free access to the advanced technology in Solaris 10, letting them take their projects to the next level. We are enthusiastic about this programme and excited to see the submissions," Kim said.

She said that all submissions must be based on the Solaris 10 OS or OpenSource OS technologies.

The source code for the Solaris 10 OS is available for free at opensolaris.org under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). To participate, interested students should go to www.sun.com/Solaris10universitychallenge.