Road to "AI for Science": Exploring Software Sustainability through "Couplers"

Dr. Kengo Nakajima, The University of Tokyo / RIKEN R-CCS

Wednesday, May 21, 2025, 2:00-2:40 pm UTC (30 min talk + 10 min questions)
7 am PDT / 9 am CDT / 10 am EDT / 2 pm UTC / 4 pm CEST / 11 pm JST

Participation is free, but registration is required
Registration link: https://siam.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Tgb2dUwqRUeiQ0r7tUriqA

Supercomputing Spotlights is a new webinar series featuring short presentations that highlight the impact and successes of high-performance computing (HPC) throughout our world. Presentations, emphasizing achievements and opportunities in HPC, are intended for the broad international community, especially students and newcomers to the field. Supercomputing Spotlights is an outreach initiative of SIAG/Supercomputing (https://siag-sc.org) … Join us!

Abstract:
"Coupler" is originally a tool for coupling multiple simulation models such as atmosphere and ocean, structure and fluid. In recent years, computer systems and workloads have become more diverse, and the role of couplers in supercomputing has become more important. In this talk, we focus on the "history" of couplers and consider what software sustainability means. We briefly describe three projects, In the 1st project (ppOpen-HPC: 2011-2018), we developed an MPI-based scalable coupler for multi-physics simulations. In the 2nd project (h3-Open-BDEC: 2019-2024), we extended the idea of multi-physics coupler for integration of Simulation/Data/Learning (S+D+L) on heterogeneous supercomputer system Wisteria/BDEC-01 by the University of Tokyo, which consists of computing nodes for computational science and engineering with A64FX (Odyssey), and those for Data Analytics/AI with NVIDIA A100 GPU's (Aquarius). The third project (JHPC-quantum: 2023-2028) has started in November 2023, further expanding h3-Open-BDEC to realize Quantum-HPC hybrid computing. In this talk, we will introduce how couplers have evolved and what role they have been playing in supercomputing.

 

Bio:
Kengo Nakajima has been a professor in the Supercomputing Research Division of the Information Technology Center at the University of Tokyo since 2008. Prior to joining the University of Tokyo in 2004, he spent 19 years in industry. He has also been a deputy director of RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) since 2018. His research interests cover computational mechanics, parallel numerical algorithms and high performance computing (HPC). Kengo holds a B.Eng in aeronautics (University of Tokyo, 1985), an MS in aerospace engineering (University of Texas at Austin, 1993), and a PhD in engineering mechanics (University of Tokyo, 2003).