SPARC (from Scalable Processor Architecture) is a RISC instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Sun Microsystems introduced in 1986.
 
SPARC is a registered trademark of SPARC International, Inc., an organization established in 1989 to promote the SPARC architecture and to provide conformance testing. Implementations of the original 32-bit SPARC architecture were initially designed and used for Sun's Sun-4 workstation and server systems, replacing their earlier Sun-3 systems based on the Motorola 68000 family of processors. Later, SPARC processors were used in SMP servers produced by Sun Microsystems, Solbourne and Fujitsu, among others and designed for 64-bit operation.
 
SPARC International was intended to open the SPARC architecture to make a larger ecosystem for the design, which has been licensed to several manufacturers, including Texas Instruments, Atmel, Cypress Semiconductor, and Fujitsu. As a result of SPARC International, the SPARC architecture is fully open and non-proprietary. In March 2006, the complete design of Sun Microsystems' UltraSPARC T1 microprocessor was released-in open-source form at OpenSPARC.net, it was named the OpenSPARC T1. As of June 2009 the SPARC design has been used by Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. to create the processor product named Venus SPARC64 VIIIfx which is capable of 128 billion floating point operations per second (128 GFLOPs). Thus the SPARC processor technology is both freely available as well as world class in terms of performance.