RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science
Research Division
Director: Akinori Yonezawa (Ph.D.)
Today's supercomputers employ hundreds of thousands of cores which work simultaneously and in parallel to rapidly calculate and process enormous volumes of data. Getting a supercomputer to work at its full potential, however, requires extremely sophisticated technology.
Achieving this kind of technology is impossible without close collaboration between computational and computer science and this is precisely what is taking place in the RIKEN AICS Research Division. Computational science involves the application of new methodologies of large-scale numerical simulation for research and development in physics, chemistry, biology, medical science, and engineering. Computer science, on the other hand, focuses on computer systems architecture, the algorithms that lay out the methods and procedures for problem-solving, management of computational and memory resources, systems software that allows communication among different computers, and application programs.
The AICS Research Division brings together researchers specializing in computational and computer science to merge and develop the two fields into what may eventually become a whole new field of interdisciplinary computational science that will maximize the potential of the supercomputer for major breakthroughs in science and technology.
Organization