Utility computing. We have set up five Points of Presence (POPs) around the world offer-

ing three flavors of grid computing. The first flavor delivers stateless CPU cycles computing

on Solaris with our Java Enterprise System stack. This mix is very good for geophysical

modeling. From the same grid, oil companies can pull up desktop images to our thin

clients from anywhere in the world. By year-end, we will be providing stateful applications

that let our oil customers put transactional information on the grid. Utility computing

enables companies to rent CPU time on many machines and handles more data at off-

times more efficiently and less expensively. It lets them expand their internal grids to a

commercial grid over the Internet through a secure IP Sec tunnel and make their internal

grid look like many thousand more CPUs than there actually are. We are piloting these

utility computing grid applications so oil companies can run their mathematical models

much faster and cheaper. We are looking to put one of these POPs in Houston, as well.

Security in the oil and gas industry is a very big deal. With prospects costing millions of

dollars to develop, you don't want that information leaking out. We have been working

with a number of companies like Schlumberger on Java badge technology, which provides

two-factor authentication - a combination of the Java badge and a PIN or password - for

access to information. The same Java card a person uses to swipe to get into the building

can be used to authenticate her or him to use the thin client and bring up an individual,

personalized desktop. With role-based access through our visual web services, our portal

product and our identity server, we can manage identity and authentication for connecting

to the systems to increase security significantly. We have been working with a few compa-

nies on Trusted Solaris, which allows them to segment information on the machine in a

way that meets Intelligence-level security standards. This allows people to access the

Internet from a secure environment without having to worry about IT leakage - proprietary

information remains secure on one segment while an employee accesses the Internet from

another segment.

Being a roughneck is among the toughest jobs on earth. As an example, oil rigs in the Gulf

of Mexico are among the most dangerous to work on due to hurricanes, tornadoes, storms,

the extreme volatility of the oil and gas beneath the rigs and the heavy equipment with all

of its moving parts above. Sun is working with its customers to create "digital, automated

rigs" that can be remotely monitored, safely, on the ground in Houston, St. Louis, New

Orleans - anywhere.

The Sun Java Workstation W2100z, released late last year, is the first line of AMD

Opteron chip-based workstations. With two AMD-Opteron chips and 16 gigs of RAM, it

works in parallel with our traditional Sparc-based workstations. It is faster and cheaper to

run than the Sparcs and it runs Linux or Windows in addition to Solaris. We can now offer

our oil industry customers, who have been running Solaris for years, the opportunity to

run Solaris, Linux or Windows on the same box - they don't need to have two boxes run-

ning in their office; that lowers the footprint. The W2100z offers visualization capabilities

for complex datasets and large images on multiple displays.

A forthcoming chip, code-named "Niagara," should be an interesting development for the

oil market. One Niagara chip is equivalent to 32 Xeon 1U servers. A symmetric multi-

processor with 8 cores and 32 threads, Niagara will enable much wider transactional and

delivery processing.

For business and transaction systems, we will have three new multithreaded chips. Chip mul-

tithreading will give you a lot more throughput than current chips because it does not have to

wait for memory - it breaks the threads out. You also get lower power consumption. In addi-

tion to Niagara, we have a chip debuting later that is twice as powerful, and then for the

imaging sector we will have a chip called "The Rock" that offers comparable improvements

for graphic imaging and fast floating-point area for the high-end graphics components.

We are looking at the extension of Sun Ray thin clients into oil and gas. We are doing a num-

ber of studies with Sun Rays to reduce the costs of desktop support and to provide secure

access to oil and gas information in remote locations. For example, 3D analyses can be done in

politically sensitive parts of the world and yet can be easily read from Houston or wherever we

have the thin client technology in place. The huge amounts of data and the computing power

needed to analyze 3D information place limits on the amount of graphics that can be used on

Sun Rays. We created a high-end graphics version of our Sun Ray thin client that lets oil con-

cerns access this information and share it via session mobility. We are piloting that now.

The Market Research Group at M-I Drilling Fluids wanted to understand customers' needs