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                                                        The Florida SunFlash
           Sun And Star Sign Joint Marketing Agreement
   
SunFLASH Vol 27 #9					          March 1991 
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New Star Supercomputer Expands Performance Range of SPARC Market

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. --March 11, 1991-- Sun Microsystems, Inc., and
Star Technologies, Inc., have signed a joint marketing agreement to
promote their respective SPARC(R) products.  The combination of Sun
workstations and servers with Star's SPARC supercomputing servers on a
network is a cost-effective solution for high-performance segments of
the scientific and engineering markets.

Sun and Star will participate in joint marketing and sales activities,
including joint sales calls, seminars and other promotional efforts
that demonstrate the advantages of SPARC products for high-performance
computing applications in distributed computing environments.  The
products included under the agreement are Sun's SPARC systems and the
Star 910/VP, a SPARC supercomputing network server recently introduced
by Star.

The addition of the Star 910/VP server to the growing selection of
SPARC systems now available from Sun and other SPARC-compatible vendors
futher expands the wide selection of SPARC solutions.  Capable of
operating at speeds of up to 160 million floating point operations per
second (MFLOPS), the Star 910/VP is a high-end SPARC-compatible network
resource.

"The availability of a low-cost SPARC supercomputer will enable Sun and
Star to penetrate new markets by leveraging SPARC's strengths, such as
price/performance, and the industry's widest range of RISC software,"
said Bill Keating, Sun's director of corporate technology marketing.

A variety of segments in the scientific and engineering markets can
take advantage of the Sun/Star solution, including design automation,
scientific research, simulation and modeling, and signal and image
processing.  A typical user site consists of networked workgroups of 10
to 20 SPARCstation(TM) graphics workstations from Sun and one or more
Star 910/VP supercomputing servers.  The Star server performs
computationally intensive tasks, while the Sun workstations are used
for application development, pre- and post-processing and other
interactive tasks.  In many sites, a SPARCserver(TM) from Sun is also
connected to the network to provide file storage.

"The fast-growing SPARC market offers users a true open systems
environment -- from laptop to supercomputer.  All of these SPARC
systems are compatible across computing platforms, creating a common
path for applications," said Bill Kiesewetter, Star's vice president of
marketing.  According to International Data Corp., SPARC is the
industry's leading RISC processor, with 66 percent of the
workstation/server market.


Star Technologies, Inc., based in Sterling, Va., is a leading supplier
of high-performance computing products, including network compute
servers, array processors and image generators.

PR contact 
Marty Coleman (415) 336-6543

Star Technologies
Helen Ryan (703) 689-4400 

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