The CEA-RIKEN High Performance Computing and Computational Science agreement was signed in January 2017 and ran for five years. During this period CEA and RIKEN focused jointly on developing and optimizing scientific applications in different areas (such as health, or material sciences, risk and hazard management…) and improving their supercomputing technologies.
There is a shared vision between Japan and France, recognizing that High Performance Computing is the basis for numerical simulation and for big data processing, which are key enablers for scientific and industrial competitiveness and economic growth. A complete control of these technologies is a challenge even for the most advanced countries. France and Japan both have national programs for exascale supercomputers, and foster co-design between industrial partners and research organisms for this purpose.
There is also a strong convergence of viewpoints on technological and methodological options: interest of ARM processor technology, open software ecosystems interoperability between architectures, co-design and partnership with industrial technology suppliers, and development of user ecosystems.
Combining efforts is a way to accelerate some developments, and amplify their dissemination while fostering extra talent generation on both sides.
The scope of the collaboration covers in particular the development of open source software components, organized in an environment that can benefit both hardware developers and software and application developers on x86 as well as ARM architectures, FPGA and accelerators.
We now open a second cycle of such CEA/RIKEN collaboration for 2022 until 2026.
Most of the collaboration topics for 2022-2026 are being continued from 2017-2021 period, slightly reorganized for more efficiency and impact, and augmented with new topics reflecting a common vision and concern regarding new computing architectures and paradigms, including quantum computing:
- Training and Skills activity organizes schools, programming hands-on, exchange of personnel, students.
- System Management track reshuffles and extends topics from previous Runtime and Scheduler themes of the 2017-2021 period ;
- Programming and Tools continues and extends previous work on programming languages and environments ;
- Quantum Computing topic explores technologies to develop qubits, and use cases and applications, as well as deployment in HPC environment and simulation of quantum systems ;
- AI and Big Data topic continues the exploration of the exploitation of massive data sets and the design of new data-based models ;
- Benchmarking new Architectures activity extends Arm-SVE previous - and continued -topic to the exploration of new architectures such as hybrid, accelerated ones; this activity has been benefitting already from access to Fugaku supercomputer, for porting, tests, experiments ;
- Applications Development for Scientific and Societal Challenges topics continue Large DFT calculations and QM/MM, and Application of High Performance Computing to Earthquake ; this topic is open to the inclusion of other application areas of joint interest
Project Management is considered with care and also includes an activity on market and technological trends watch, and socio-economic benchmarking.
CEA RIKEN collaboration is involving more than 60 researchers in HPC, AI and Big Data, working together from different places, meeting twice a year during plenary workshops in France and Japan alternatively.
Thanks to the CEA and RIKEN collaboration, French and Japanese researchers achieved a number of advances and original developments in computational and computing sciences are looking forward for more success stories in the next five years.