On Wednesday, Sun Microsystems began releasing its Solaris Cluster code to the open source community, reports vnunet.

The company wants to expand the market for high-performance computing beyond areas such as finance and research and development and to accelerate what it called the "dumbing down" of HPC technology.

It says some companies would be interested in making some aspects more widely available without going to the expense of building fully redundant systems.

The company released the OpenSolaris operating system two years ago and has since been releasing other code, InfoWorld notes.

It says the code, which will help developers build clustered and high-availability applications and services, will be released over the next 18 months on the OpenSolaris Web site.