Report on AICS visit to ALCF on November 25, 2013

A delegation of nine staff members from the Operations and Computer Technologies Division of AICS (RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science) and the cooperative interaction and user support group in RIST (Research Organization for Information Science & Technology), visited the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), which is affiliated with the US Argonne National Laboratory, on November 25, 2013.

This visit took place at the time of the signing of an MOU for research collaboration, agreed on November 18, 2013 between AICS and ALCF.

The parties discussed specific shared practices for operations and computer technologies or user support for large scale computational facilities, and the delegation were taken on a facility tour that included Mira, a petaflops-scale supercomputer operated by ALCF, and the facility’s visualization technology.

The presentation made by AICS and RIST attracted a large audience including ALCF staff and university students. This fact showed the high level of interest in the K computer, which is a roughly equivalent system to Mira.
The visit to ALCF this time was very productive for us, including the ALCF presentation explaining their user support system developed in-house, and the actual situation of maintenance, which were very educational for us.
In addition, ALCF suggested that we further expand collaboration in applications and visualization technology, so the relationship seems certain to develop in the future.

We are committed to contributing to the smooth operation and user support for the K computer, based on mutual collaboration with ALCF, through exchanges of valuable information and knowledge as well as exchanges of human resources.