The organization said it selected Sun's OpenSPARC technology because of its advanced architecture and freely available commercial designs.

The project is intended to strengthen the open source community and further next-generation multi-core, multithreading development, both on the OpenSPARC T1 and OpenSPARC T2 processors.

As part of the initiative, some 650 European Universities and research institutions will get the opportunity to develop processor designs based on Sun's OpenSPARC technology.

"We believe access to this technology will help boost Europes capabilities in teaching and research in the microprocessor field," said Dr. John McLean, Head of Europractice Software Service.

Europractice is a European Union-backed non-profit microelectronics design stimulation project managed by the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. As part of the effort, Sun and Europractice will hold the first in a series of OpenSPARC technology workshops over the next few months.

"Our collaboration with Europractice will help open doors for tens of thousands of advanced engineering students and next-generation technology leaders across Europe," said Lin Lee, vice president of global communities, Sun Microsystems.

The European initiative builds on similar efforts by Sun and universities in China, Taiwan, New Zealand and the United States.

"As one of Europe's leading universities in the microelectronic design space, we view this development as important to our drive to integrate leading technology to create next- generation hardware solutions for the business environment," said Professor Per Stenstrom, Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, in a statement.

Sun first introduced the UltraSPARC T1 processor, an eight-core, 32-thread, general purpose processors in 2005. Two years later, it introduced the second generation of CMT processors, the UltraSPARC T2, which doubled the thread count of the UltraSPARC T1, to 64.