Strengthening Japanese-Finnish partnership in high-performance computing

On May 11, a Memorandum of Cooperation (MoC) was signed by the RIKEN Center for Computational Science and the CSC – Center for Science Information Technology, a Finnish center of expertise in information technology, to strengthen collaboration in the area of high-performance computing, making use of two world-leading supercomputers—the Fugaku supercomputer managed by RIKEN and LUMI, Europe's most efficient pre-exascale supercomputer, which is hosted by CSC. The goal is to promote international cutting-edge research by enabling Finnish and Japanese researchers to utilize ever more efficient computational tools for their collaborative efforts.

The agreement was signed in Tokyo by Kimmo Koski, Managing Director of CSC and Satoshi Matsuoka, Director of RIKEN R-CCS. From the two respective governments, words of support were given by Ville Skinnari, Finnish Minister for Development Cooperation and Foreign Trade, and Hideyuki Tanaka, Vice-Minister of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT).

In his remarks, Center Director Matsuoka said, “As the two machines are architecturally very different while providing similar computing capabilities, comparisons of the platforms as well as development of software that can run across the machines efficiently will pave the way for significant advances of the supercomputing field.”

From left to right: Director Kimmo Koski, Minister Ville Skinnari, Vice-Minister Hideyuki Tanaka, Director Satoshi Matsuoka