Advanced computing as a bridge between Portugal and Japan: INESC TEC and AIST reinforce scientific cooperation

Five years have passed since INESC TEC and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), in Japan, signed the first Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). This scientific cooperation agreement, focused on advanced computing, led to major opportunities for mobility, joint publications and the exchange of knowledge and experiences, thus bringing the Portuguese and Japanese R&D ecosystems closer together – particularly in High-Performance Computing (HPC). Recently, the two institutes renewed the MoU and will continue to work together to boost research in advanced computing.

Infrastructures and applications for advanced computing and large-scale data visualisation – these are the main domains explored by researchers from INESC TEC and AIST over the past five years. Under a Memorandum of Understanding, the two institutes organised visits, provided exchange opportunities to Portuguese researchers and published works in a series of international conferences – the knowledge exchanged between the teams led to R&D projects.

"Our teams’ visits to AIST, for example, were extremely important to discuss solutions in the area of advanced computing; from the outset, data management and energy efficiency techniques in the processing of large models for simulation and AI, as well as funding and exchange opportunities. They also had the opportunity to increase their knowledge about the operation of the ABCI supercomputer and better understand how their research in distributed storage systems may have more impact on the performance of this supercomputer," said Rui Oliveira, also stating that INESC TEC welcomed researchers from AIST.

According to the Director of INESC TEC, thanks to this partnership, four Portuguese researchers were able to carry out a two-month virtual internship at the Japanese Institute, guided by the researcher Jason Haga, while collaborating with experts in their areas of research and learning about Japanese culture. The institutions organised a workshop with Thammasat University, and published five works at key international conferences dedicated to data storage and HPC. "We have mainly collaborated on new solutions to improve data management in HPC centres and boost Artificial Intelligence applications," reinforced João Tiago Paulo, a researcher at INESC TEC - who, in 2020, spent a month at AIST as a visiting researcher. The researcher also recalled the five-year CENTRA (Efficient and Secure Data Management for HPC and Cloud Computing) project between INESC TEC and AIST, which aims to study new data management solutions for distributed cloud and HPC environments. 
 

"In addition, the exchange of knowledge between the two institutions and the research topics they both worked on had repercussions on two projects funded by the UT Austin Portugal Program, namely the PASTOR project - Programmable and Adaptable Storage for AI-oriented HPC Ecosystems and BigHPC - A Management Framework for Consolidated Big Data and High-Performance Computing", added Andreia Passos, Head of the International Relations Service at INESC TEC; she also mentioned that "this is an example of a MoU that actually materialised, leading to very concrete and important results for INESC TEC and AIST teams – and that's why we renewed the collaboration, towards continuing our efforts."

INESC TEC and AIST are members of the CENTRA Network, which aims to facilitate collaboration and allow the application of transnational cyber infrastructures, relying on members from countries like Indonesia, the United States of America, Vietnam or Japan.

Finally, last year marked the beginning of the HANAMI - HPC Alliance for Applications and Supercomputing Innovation: the Europe-Japan Collaboration project, featuring INESC TEC; this endeavour aims to improve cooperation between Europe and Japan in supercomputing. The project seeks to promote advances in supercomputing, facilitating the exchange of computational resources between Europe and Japan – for example, European scientists will be able to access the Fugaku supercomputer, a machine capable of performing more than one billion operations per second (currently number four in the Top500 of world supercomputers).

This article was first published on 3 February by INESC TEC.