These building blocks provide an array of expertise, products, technologies, alliances, and services to design form-fitting grid architectures that help users achieve higher utilization of their existing resources and provide them with access to resources that they may not have within their networks.

Sun's building blocks for grid come under four categories: access (enables efficient usage of resources regardless of location), data (enables the collection, management, and protection of data regardless of user or data location) computation (provides excellent price-performance with clusters of small systems as well as excellent price/productivity with superclusters that utilize very large memory and simplified programming environments) and visualization (enable applications to perform graphics operations using local or remote graphics systems)

"Grid computing is about building local or global trade exchanges for compute capacity and data access," said Shahin Khan, Sun's vice president of high performance and technical computing. "It is at the tipping point of moving from grass-roots deployment to becoming a business imperative. As is often the case, the science and engineering market place is the early adopter of technology and a perfect proving ground for new technologies. Extensive HPTC collaborations provide Sun with the required expertise and a unique perspective on the readiness of such technologies for deployment in business computing."

Sun's Grid Everywhere initiative features a three-pronged approach to grid deployment based on building block components, extensive partnerships and alliances. It focuses on the HPTC market as the early-adopters of technologies that over time gain broad acceptance in business computing. Grid Everywhere is led by Sun's HPTC business unit, which was formed six months ago to leverage Sun's experience in HPTC and its portfolio of products and solutions to grow Sun's stake in high performance technical computing.