Japanese Computing Center Discusses Potential Collaborations

Representatives from Japan’s Tsukuba University’s Center for Computational Sciences (CCS) visited Berkeley Lab on Feb. 24-25 to meet with researchers from NERSC and CRD and to explore areas of potential collaboration.

The university is located 30 miles northeast of Tokyo in an area known as Tsukuba Science City, home to Japan’s national research facilities encompassing such fields as science, industry, agriculture and forestry, environment and space development. CCS has been involved in parallel computing research since 1977 and has historically deployed custom-designed systems tailored to scientific applications.

Like NERSC, which was created in 1974 solely to support fusion research but now supports a wide range of disciplines, CCS was established in 1992 as the Center for Computational Physics and now supports research in physics, life sciences and global environmental science.

“In this meeting, we hope we can identify research topics we can collaborate on,” said CCS Director Mitsuhisa Sato. “In additions to research collaborations, we would also like to exchange expertise.”

Among the areas for collaboration, Sato discussed both petascale and exascale computing, areas in which both Berkeley Lab and CCS has research programs. To better facilitate the exchange of researchers and students, Sato said the university has instituted computational science courses in English as part of its “Global 30 Program.”

Berkeley Lab presenters were Horst Simon, Kathy Yelick, Hemant Shukla, Jim Demmel, Sherry Li, Tony Drummond, Ann Almgren, Chao Yang, Andrew Canning, Dan Martin, Costin Iancu and Sam Williams.

“Our two organizations share a number of similarities and common interests for future research,” said CRD’s Esmond Ng, who organized the meeting. “Hopefully we laid the groundwork for building on those and finding ways to collaborate.