Director of Riken-Center for Computational Science, Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech)

“Towards Fugaku-NEXT: Debunking the HPC Myths, Pursuing Science Instead”

Thursday 16 February, 4:05pm – 4.50pm

Abstract

Following up on the success of Fugaku, Riken R-CCS is now on course to realize its successor, Fugaku-NEXT, ideally by the end of the 2020s. However, the next generation breakthrough in performance is being inhibited by a variety of factors pertaining to the slowdown of Moore’s Law. In fact, such difficulty is generating a series of rather technically unfounded views on evolutionary paths on computing, or ‘myths’, that are distorting the right way of moving forward. As a institute of leading edge science, we are undertaking a scientific, methodological approach to how next generation machines may achieve more than an order of magnitude performance gains over Fugaku, while retaining its other trait, being broad and general purpose to be applicable to wideraning problems we face today as a society today.

Bio

Ph. D. from the University of Tokyo in 1993. A Full Professor at the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center (GSIC), the Tokyo Institute of Technology since 2000, and the director of the joint AIST-Tokyo Tech. Real World Big Data Computing Open Innovation Laboratory (RWBC-OIL) in 2017.

Since April 2018, he has been the director of Riken Center for Computational Science (R-CCS), the Tier-1 national HPC center for Japan, developing and hosting Japan’s flagship ‘Fugaku’ supercomputer which has become the fastest supercomputer in the world in all four major supercomputer rankings in 2020 and 2021 (Top500, HPCG, HPL-AI, Graph500), along with multitudes of ongoing cutting edge HPC research being conducted, including investigating Post-Moore era computing, especially the future FugakuNEXT supercomputer.

Other accolades include the Fellow positions in societies/conferences ACM, ISC, and the JSSST; the ACM Gordon Bell Prizes in 2011 & 2021; the IEEE-CS Sidney Fernbach Award in 2014 as well as the IEEE-CS Computer Society Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award in 2022, both being the highest awards in the field of HPC, and the only individual to receive these awards; the Technical Papers Chair and the Program Chair for ACM/IEEE Supercomputing 2009 and 2013 (SC09 and SC13) respectively as well as many other conference chairs, and the ACM Gordon Bell Prize selection committee chair in 2018.

His longtime contribution was commended with the Medal of Honor with Purple ribbon by his Majesty Emperor Naruhito of Japan in 2022