Kenichi Miura
Professor, Information Systems Architecture Research Division, National Institute of Informatics
<Abstract>
In my talk, I will describe the outline of the new national project on the next generation supercomputer and the National Research Grid Initiative (NAREGI) project on Grid middleware research and development, and discuss how they are related.
Under the auspices of Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), a new project has been initiated in Japan for development and application of advanced high-performance supercomputer system. This is a 7 year project starting FY 2006, with an expected total budget of ~$1B. The objectives of this project are development, installation and usage of the multi-petaflops class supercomputing system as a national leadership machine to be utilized by academia, research communities and industries. RIKEN will be the main contractor of this project. This project includes such programs as research and development of the system software including Grid middleware and the grand challenge applications, development of the hardware system, and establishment and operation of the Advanced Center for Computational Science and Technology based on the said system.
The National Research Grid Initiative (NAREGI), which originally started as a five-year project from FY 2003, also funded by MEXT, is one of the major Japanese national Grid projects. Collaboration among industry, academia, and the government will play a key role in NAREGI. The Center for Grid Research and Development has been established at the National Institute of Informatics as a core center for R&D on high-performance, scalable Grid middleware technologies, which are aimed at providing a future computational infrastructure and environment for scientific and engineering research. As an example of utilizing such Grid technologies in the scientific communities, the Computational Nanoscience Center, another core center of NAREGI, located at the Institute for Molecular Science, is conducting research on leading-edge, Grid-enabled nano-science and nanotechnology simulation applications.
The NAREGI Grid middleware is expected to be utilized as one of the software layers in the nation-wide Cyber Science Infrastructure (CSI) framework, which has been newly initiated at the National Institute of Informatics.
As a part of the system software development program within the next generation supercomputer project, NAREGI will continue to conduct research and development of the Grid middleware. In particular, NAREGI is directed toward providing the seamless computational environment to research and academic communities in the forthcoming "peta-scale" era.
<Biographical Notes>
Present
Professor, Information Systems Architecture Research Division, National Institute of Informatics
Education
1964 - 1968 Undergraduate Student in the Faculty of Science, University of Tokyo, Received B.Sc.1968 - 1973 Graduate Student in the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, received Ph.D. (Thesis advisor; Dr. Daniel Slotnick)
Academic Career
1973 - 2002 Fujitsu Limited, Mainframes division and HPC division2000 - 2003 Visiting Professor, Computer and Communication Center, Kyushu University
2002 - 2003 Fellow, Fujitsu Laboratories Limited
2003 - Professor, the National Institute of Informatics
Project leader, National Research Grid Initiative (NAREGI)2005 - Visiting Professor, National Astronomical Observatory
Supercomputer architecture and performance evaluationParallel and vector numerical algorithms
Monte Carlo simulation, Random number generation
Grid computing