Leadership

Satoshi Matsuoka has been the director of RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) since 2018. He is responsible for developing the supercomputer Fugaku 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 Fugaku NEXT supercomputer.

He holds Ph. D. from the University of Tokyo in 1993. He was a Professor at the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center (GSIC), the Tokyo Institute of Technology, the director of the joint AIST-Tokyo Tech. Real World Big Data Computing Open Innovation Laboratory (RWBC-OIL). He was the leader of the TSUBAME series of supercomputers that had also received many international acclaims, at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, where he still holds a professor position, to continue his research activities in HPC as well as scalable Big Data and AI.

He has written over 500 articles according to Google Scholar, and chaired numerous conferences, including 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.

He is a Fellow of ACM, ISC, JSSST (Japan Society for Software Science and Technology) and IPSJ (Information Processing Society of Japan). His accolades are 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 both awards.
His longtime contribution for the computer science research was commended with the Medal of Honor with Purple ribbon by His Majesty the Emperor of Japan in 2022.

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.