On June 16th, JSPS Washington Office held the 11th "Science in Japan" Foru

m at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC. This forum, which seeks to promote Japan-US collaboration by introducing the latest trends in Japanese scientific research, has since 1996 been held with the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the US Department of Energy (DOE), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The topic of this year was "Supercomputer and its Applications" as supercomputer gets increased attention of both Japan and United States recently.

The forum opened with remarks from Dr. Akira Masaike, Director of JSPS Washington Office, who explained the importance of the "Science in Japan" Forum series and why supercomputer was chosen as the forum's theme and introduced the two moderators.

The morning session was moderated by Dr. Thomas Zacharia, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who pronounced the forum to be very timely and important. The session proceeded with presentations from Prof. Yoshio Oyanagi, Kogakuin University; Prof. Kenichi Miura, National Institute of Informatics; Prof. Horst Simon, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Dr. Stephen Meacham of the National Science Foundation moderated the afternoon session, who spoke about applications of high performance computing, the high performance network called TeraGrid, and NSF's part in the high performance computing field. The session proceeded with presentations from Prof. Taisuke Boke, University of Tsukuba; Dr. Yutaka Akiyama, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and technology; and Prof. Mutsumi Aoyagi, Kyushu University.

All of the speakers were leading experts in their respective fields. As their presentations remained broad in scope while elaborating the latest state of related research, they were of considerable interest to general science practitioners and administrators as well as to specialists in those fields.

The forum assembled some 150 government administrators, university researchers and others, who listened avidly to the presentations and exchanged information on research in the subject fields with the speakers and one another.