Leadership

Satoshi Matsuoka had been a Full Professor at the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center (GSIC), the Tokyo Institute of Technology since 2001, and the director of the joint AIST-Tokyo Tech. Real World Big Data Computing Open Innovation Laboratory (RWBC-OIL) since 2017, and will become a Specially Appointed Professor at Tokyo Tech starting 2018 along with his directorship at R-CCS. He received his Ph. D. from the University of Tokyo in 1993.

He has been the leader of the TSUBAME series of supercomputers that have won many accolades such as world #1 in power-efficient computing. He also leads various major supercomputing research projects in areas such as parallel algorithms and programming, resilience, green computing, and convergence of big data/AI with HPC. He has been a major driving force behind the development of the next-generation flagship supercomputer of Japan, the supercomputer Fugaku. In June 2020 Fugaku won the first place in four major rankings of supercomputer performance, Top500, HPCG, HPL-AI, and Graph500.

He has written over 500 articles according to Google Scholar, and chaired numerous ACM/IEEE conferences, including the Program Chair at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference (SC13) in 2013. He is a Fellow of the ACM and European ISC, and has won many awards, including the JSPS Prize from the Japan Society for Promotion of Science in 2006, presented by his Highness Prince Akishino; the ACM Gordon Bell Prize in 2011; the Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in 2012; the 2014 IEEE-CS Sidney Fernbach Memorial Award, the highest prestige in the field of HPC; HPDC 2018 Achievement Award from ACM; and recently SC Asia 2019 HPC Leadership Award.

After graduating from the Department of Aeronautics, the University of Tokyo, Kengo Nakajima was affiliated with the Mitsubishi Research Institute, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Research Organization for Information Science and Technology before returning to the University of Tokyo to earn his Ph.D. in engineering. He has held positions in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science, the University of Tokyo, and in the Supercomputing Division, Information Technology Center, the University of Tokyo, and served as a Senior Visiting Scientist at RIKEN AICS. He assumed the current position in 2018, with concurrent appointment as Professor at the Information Technology Center of the University of Tokyo.

His research interests include: computational dynamics, computational fluid dynamics, numerical linear algebra, parallel algorithms, R&D for GeoFEM, HPC-MW, ppOpen-HPC, and parallel application frameworks. Dr. Namajima is a Council Member of the International Association for Computational Mechanics (IACM)

After earning undergraduate degree from the Department of Applied Physics at the University of Tokyo, Yasumasa Watanabe joined the Science and Technology Agency (now MEXT, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) in 1989.

Since then, he has worked in policy planning and project promotion for atomic energy field, in addition to policy planning and promotion of international collaboration, university-industry collaboration, agricultural production and environmental regulations.
In the meantime, he earned the degree of Master of Public Administration at the Cornell University.
He also planned and promoted university-industry collaboration projects and university reform at the Kobe University, Hokkaido University, and Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology.
He was appointed to the current position in April 2023.

Yuji Sugita graduated from the Faculty of Science, Kyoto University in 1993 and received his Ph.D. in science from the Department of Chemistry, the Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University in 1998. After working at the RIKEN Cellular Signaling Laboratory, Institute for Molecular Science, and Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences, the University of Tokyo, he joined RIKEN in 2007 as an Associate Chief Scientist at Theoretical Biochemistry Laboratory, Discovery Research Institute, and, from 2012, is working as a Chief Scientist at Theoretical Molecular Science Laboratory, Advanced Science Institute (now Theoretical Molecular Science Laboratory, Cluster for Pioneering Research). He has also served as a Team Leader of the Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS, now R-CCS) since 2010 and the Quantitative Biology Center (QBiC, now Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research, BDR) since 2018, and served his current position in 2024.

Using theoretical chemistry, he aims to elucidate the structure and dynamics of various molecular systems, including biomolecules, and to develop new molecular functions that can be applied to medical, environmental, and energy problems. To this end, he is developing new computational methods and molecular models that integrate theoretical chemistry and biophysics beyond the conventional framework. His group has developed GENESIS, a multi-scale molecular dynamics software optimized for Fugaku and other supercomputers; with GENESIS, they aim to extend the spatial and temporal limitations in current molecular dynamics simulations.