NERSCPowering Scientific Discovery for 50 Years

Japanese Computing Center Discusses Potential Collaborations

February 26, 2011

Representatives from Japan’s Tsukuba University’s Center for Computational Sciences (CCS) visited Berkeley Lab on Feb. 24-25 to meet with researchers from NERSC and CRD and to explore areas of potential collaboration.Japan Tsukuba University Center for Computational Sciences (CCS) logo

The university is located 30 miles northeast of Tokyo in an area known as Tsukuba Science City, home to Japan’s national research facilities encompassing such fields as science, industry, agriculture and forestry, environment and space development. CCS has been involved in parallel computing research since 1977 and has historically deployed custom-designed systems tailored to scientific applications.

Like NERSC, which was created in 1974 solely to support fusion research but now supports a wide range of disciplines, CCS was established in 1992 as the Center for Computational Physics and now supports research in physics, life sciences and global environmental science.

“In this meeting, we hope we can identify research topics we can collaborate on,” said CCS Director Mitsuhisa Sato. “In additions to research collaborations, we would also like to exchange expertise.”

Among the areas for collaboration, Sato discussed both petascale and exascale computing, areas in which both Berkeley Lab and CCS has research programs. To better facilitate the exchange of researchers and students, Sato said the university has instituted computational science courses in English as part of its “Global 30 Program.”


Berkeley Lab presenters were Horst Simon, Kathy Yelick, Hemant Shukla, Jim Demmel, Sherry Li, Tony Drummond, Ann Almgren, Chao Yang, Andrew Canning, Dan Martin, Costin Iancu and Sam Williams.

“Our two organizations share a number of similarities and common interests for future research,” said CRD’s Esmond Ng, who organized the meeting. “Hopefully we laid the groundwork for building on those and finding ways to collaborate.


About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility that serves as the primary high-performance computing center for scientific research sponsored by the Office of Science. Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the NERSC Center serves almost 10,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in climate, fusion energy, materials science, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. Berkeley Lab is a DOE national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy. »Learn more about computing sciences at Berkeley Lab.