CEA and RIKEN held bi-annual workshop at Kobe

CEA and RIKEN are already strongly collaborating on applications development and optimization through joint work on CEA’s applications Smilei and WarpX (both Particle in Cell applications) and Gysela (fusion plasma application). These three applications have been granted access to Fugaku in fall 2021 in the context of the collaboration, and thanks to an in-depth optimization of WarpX, CEA and RIKEN managed to get finalist of the ACM Gordon-Bell prize for SC22 conference.

“Working on Fugaku in the context of the CEA/RIKEN collaboration is a chance as CEA researcher can prepare their code for Arm architecture at the exascale level with the help of experts from RIKEN”, said France Boillod-Cerneux, managing the collaboration for the CEA, “We would like to renew this successful experience with more CEA applications which could get benefit from Fugaku architecture”.

A specific emphasis was put on Quantum Computing (QC) during this workshop, as this work package has been recently created in January 2022. Both CEA and RIKEN are fostering QC research within their institutes (from the fundamental research to the application development). After online kick-off of these discussions, meeting in Kobe was the occasion for the teams to discuss in person. Possible interactions on quantum computing could focus on the integration of Quantum Processing Units (QPUs) within HPC infrastructures, as well as experiencing quantum algorithms on different QPUs architecture by mutual access to respective quantum computing facilities.

CEA and RIKEN will also foster activities in Artificial Intelligence: teams have been discussing the development and accuracy of AI models to replace regular high performance computing simulations, or improve the usage of HPC systems (such as using AI models to improve energy consumption of HPC systems). Future meetings will be organized to identify cores subjects of common interest.

The CEA RIKEN collaboration is involving more than 60 researchers in HPC, AI and Big Data, working together from different places, meeting twice a year during plenary workshops in France and Japan alternatively.

Despite of the COVID-19 pandemic situation, CEA and RIKEN successfully organized the CEA-RIKEN workshop on October 18 and 19 at RIKEN R-CCS in a form of a hybrid workshop. During the workshop, we had productive discussion in several other research collaboration areas, in addition to application porting, Quantum Computing and AI and BigData: Training and Skills, System Management, Programming and Tools, Benchmarking new Architectures and more Applications Development for Scientific and Societal Challenges (seismic, materials sciences).

Thanks to the CEA and RIKEN collaboration, French and Japanese researchers achieved a number of advances and original developments in computational and computing sciences are looking forward for more success stories in the next five years.