The Minnesota Population Center received an Academic Equipment Grant from Sun Microsystems to help develop and distribute the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series-International census database. The computing power required by the project is easily provided by the computers in the grant: two Sun Microsystems Enterprise 450's, with a total of six 400MHz CPU's, 4 gigabytes of RAM, and 18 gigabytes of internal hard disk. Additionally, Sun provided two A1000 Storage Arrays, which provides an additional 436 gigabytes of highly-secure hard disk space, required by the project's massive task of creating and distributing integrated international census samples.

The Sun equipment is maintained by the Social Science Research Facility (SSRF) at the University. The SSRF receives funding from the College of Liberal Arts to facilitate research activity that makes use of computing technology. Under the direction of John Easton, the SSRF has13 years of experience working with Sun products and 10 years of experience supporting the networked computational requirements of the Minnesota Population Center.