Linux on the SPARC-based processor they developed. The search for venture capital continued, since creating a server company requires substantial resources, but there was little available during the recession following 9/11. Afara began negotiations with Sun Microsystems, and the acquisition was consummated in July 2002. This new acquisition fell under the umbrella of Fred DeSantis, the vice president of engineering for horizontal systems at Sun. During the due-diligence process, Brian Sutphin sensed (as in Fermi Wang, the "CEO" mentioned that there were no term sheets on the table) from executives he was interacting with that Afara did not have any alternate sources of funding and reduced the offer from high triple digit millions of dollars to < $500M. Contributions and impact The project included many technology contributions among Linux, Solaris and SPARC. The Afara CPU used a SPARC port of Debian GNU/Linux initially. Debian GNU/Linux contributions to Afara Websystem's former CPU architecture continued to grow, including commercial support for Ubuntu, a Debian GNU/Linux-based operating system. Afara Websystems' former platform direction seemed further validated when Sun hired Ian Murdock, founder of the Debian distribution, to head operating system platform strategy, and cross-pollinate Solaris with a new OS packaging technology similar to that of Debian GNU/Linux. The new CPU architecture of Afara Websystems, which became known as "Niagara", had enough merit to cause a competing internal Sun project under DeSantis' organization, called "Honeybee", to be canceled. Pressure was placed on the computing industry to add cores and threads. While competing microprocessor vendors were designing dual-core chips with two dual-threads per core, the original "Niagara" architecture was a more radical design: an eight core processor with four threads per core. The new family of SPARC microprocessors, trademarked by Sun as "CoolThreads", was released with model names of UltraSPARC T1 (2005), UltraSPARC T2 (2007), UltraSPARC T2 Plus (2008) and the further derivative UltraSPARC T3 (2010). While SPARC is an open instruction set architecture, where vendors build their own processors to an open specification defined by SPARC International, this new family of microprocessors was not only created to the open specification, but its implementation was now free, where people could download the source code, and manufacture them independently. For web serving loads, Sun had catapulted to become the uncontested fastest single processor on the planet in December 2005, performing 7x faster than the closest Intel server, and has been consistently the highest throughput web server,