Call for Collaborative Research Projects for Verifying the Cloud-Like Use of Fugaku

The RIKEN Center for Computational Science (RIKEN R-CCS) invites proposals of collaborative research projects for a trial cloud-like use service using the computational resources of the supercomputer Fugaku (hereafter "Projects").
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RIKEN R-CCS has been appointed to lead the development of Fugaku in the supercomputer Fugaku development plan initiated by the Ministry of Education、Culture、Sports、Science and Technology (MEXT) of Japan and intends to start its public operation around 2021.

Fugaku is now being developed as the successor to the supercomputer K, which　served as a specific high-speed computer facility defined by the Act on the Promotion of Public Utilization of the Specific Advanced Large Research Facilities. While the K computer has been used as a science and technology infrastructure of the world’s highest level and produced many excellent results, Fugaku is intended for producing maximum achievements through the expansion of its utilization in view of Society 5.0. For this, it is especially important to improve the convenience of its use, and the issue is thus one of the main focuses in its development. As part of this process, we will carry out a trial operation of Fugaku in the cloud-like use form in about FY2020 for verifying its effectiveness for the full-scale operation planned to start in FY2021. The results of this verification will be reflected in establishing a management system for the full-scale operation.

The cloud-like use here means a form of using Fugaku in which its computational resources are provided to its users as a computational environment through service providers. It is expected that the collaboration between RIKEN R-CCS, which has operation know-how of high-performance computers (HPC), and service providers having cloud technology and application service technology will improve the utility of Fugaku and expand its usership. At the same time, we intend to contribute to the large development of the IT industry by widely introducing into the cloud infrastructure not only the hardware and software technology of Fugaku, which is the world’s leading-edge HPC system, but also its related technologies, such as foremost use services and operation technologies to be developed through its cloud-like use.

In these Projects, we will also carry out the feasibility study of the accepted proposals according to the following policies to verify the feasibility and effect of the cloud-like use form of Fugaku.