Feasibility Study - Future HPCI Applications

1. Identifying future research projects in computational science

The Feasibility Study on Future HPC Infrastructure was conducted from July 2012 to March 2014, commissioned by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). Anticipating the work to develop the post-K computer, the study, targeting the years 2018 to 2020, clarified the needs of computational resources—such as supercomputers—regarding their function and performance. As for application software, AICS collaborated with the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, receiving support from experts in theory and practice of computational science and HPC strategic programming.

The application software feasibility study identified societal and scientific issues pertinent to the computational science field. The Computational Science Roadmap, a report describing the applications and features needed for the new system, was issued. The Roadmap was submitted to a working group of the HPC infrastructure planning committee set up by MEXT, which was reflected in a report on the future of HPC infrastructure development issued in March, 2012. To continue these efforts, the MEXT committee to consider the social and scientific priority issues to be tackled by using post-K computer was set up and has made a major contribution by identifying major areas to consider in developing the post-K computer.

2. Beyond the post-K computer

Looking ahead to the future of computational science, the committee for further advancement of computational science using HPC infrastructure (computational science committee) met from 2014 to 2017 under the framework of “HPCI operations” commissioned by MEXT. Forums in the field of computational science were held during this period, which served as a basis for regular updates to the Computational Science Roadmap.