Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen.

On behalf of JSPS Washington Office, I would like to give a brief address as the organizer of the forum.

It is a great pleasure for us to welcome all of you to the Eleventh “Science in Japan” Forum.

I wish to thank the speakers, moderators and all the participants joining us today in support of the purpose of this forum.

Japan Society for the Promotion of Science has a long history, which is much longer than the modern history of Computer Science. It was founded in 1932 as a funding agency in Japan. Since then, JSPS has developed its activities by giving support to creative research in basic science. First, we provide several grants for innovative research. Secondly, we encourage young researchers by providing fellowships for post-doctoral fellows and graduate students. Thirdly, JSPS promotes international co-operations.

As one of the activities of international co-operations, we have been organizing the “Science in Japan” Forums in Washington DC once every year for the last 10 years. The purpose of the forum is to introduce leading edge research trends being advanced recently in Japan. The forum also serves to promote mutual communication among scientists in Japan, the United States and other countries. Furthermore, it contributes to advance greater scientific cooperation and to exchange a wealth of knowledge and information freely among all of us.

The topics of the forum of this year are the supercomputer and its applications to basic sciences.

In recent years, we have seen remarkable progress in the high performance computing system and in its applications in wide field of science in Japan. In particular, in this year, a new project has been initiated in Japan for development of an advanced supercomputer system. In addition, several projects of high performance computing systems and its applications have been launched for the past few years. On the other hands, President George Bush pointed out in his State of Union Address of this year that the United States will support promising areas such as supercomputing and so on. I have heard that petaflop/s performance will be reached within a few years in the United States.

I am not the specialist of the supercomputer. However, as a particle physicist, I am much interested in applications of high performance computing systems, since I am sure that it opens new fields in physics and astronomy. I believe that high performance computing is indispensable for advancing all the fields in science and technology.

I am quite happy to realize the forum which devotes to these topics.

We do hope the presentations and discussion in this forum will create opportunities of collaborative works in this field of science.

Taking this opportunity, I would like to extend our deepest appreciation to The National Science Foundation, The US Department of Energy, The National Institutes of Health, and American Association for the Advancement of Science for their most kind cooperation and support in organizing this forum.

Now, it is my great honor to introduce Dr. Thomas Zacharia, the Associate Laboratory Director, Computing and Computational Directorate, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to be the moderator of the morning session.

For the afternoon session, we are going to ask Dr. Stephen Meacham, the Program Director of High-Performance Computing, Office of Cyber-Infrastructure, National Science Foundation, to be the moderator.