NCI signs MoU with Japanese supercomputing facility

Australia’s national high performance computing and data analytics facility, the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Japan’s RIKEN Centre for Computational Science (R-CCS) in support of world-leading computational science, outlining a program of knowledge exchange, research collaboration and technological development.

As the supercomputing world moves into the exascale era, at which supercomputers are capable of performing over 1 billion billion operations per second, the biggest scientific advances are expected to come from high-performance software optimised for these machines. NCI and R-CCS are thus committing significant computational resources and expertise to support the development of the next generation of molecular modelling software.

The MoU will enable Australian researcher Dr Giuseppe Barca to port his existing EXtreme-scale Electronic Structure System (EXESS) molecular modelling code onto the world’s second-most powerful supercomputer, RIKEN’s Fugaku, as well as Australia’s most powerful CPU-based supercomputer, NCI’s Gadi. As EXESS can be interfaced with any existing computational chemistry package, this code porting will enable researchers around the world to benefit from its already record-breaking performance. Porting this code to the Fugaku system should enable researchers to solve grand challenges in the energy, sustainability and health sectors.

“NCI and RIKEN are close collaborators with a shared interest in future-focused technology and software development,” said NCI Director Professor Sean Smith. “We are thrilled to be bringing our expert teams together with ANU researchers to create next-generation performance for a piece of critical scientific code.”

R-CCS Director Professor Satoshi Matsuoka added, “Science is global, and as such, to conduct top-tier research, being able to utilise the world’s top-class infrastructure involving the best researchers is essential. At Riken R-CCS, we feel very privileged to be able to establish this MoU with NCI Australia and ANU, bridging the best supercomputing infrastructures and the minds of both countries. I expect a number of fruitful scientific results will be produced as a result of this collaboration.”

Image courtesy NCI.