CSC’s collaboration efforts with Japan are gaining traction with the launch of two collaborative research projects aiming to increase the global impact of the LUMI infrastructure and support the internationalization of Finnish research community. The projects are enabled by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture.
The collaborative projects, selected via an Open Call for Expressions of Interest, bring together Finnish and Japanese researchers and experts, who will capitalize on supercomputer LUMI’s and potentially also Japan’s Fugaku’s computing resources to address top-level research and innovation topics in climate and environmental science and machine learning that will contribute to resolving contemporary global challenges and demonstrate LUMI’s capabilities and potential at the global scale.
Adjunct Professor Dr. Rupert Gladstone from the Arctic Centre of the University of Lapland leads one of the selected projects aiming to develop an emulator to simulate the behaviour of the Antarctic ice sheet and project its role in global sea level rise during the next two centuries. Dr. Gladstone will collaborate with multiple researchers from different Japanese academic and research institutions to develop and optimize the ice sheet models, which will then be run on LUMI to form the projection.
Professor Samuel Kaski from Aalto University and Associate Professor Antti Honkela from the University of Helsinki, both part of the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence (FCAI), lead a project looking to create an AI assistant to help develop privacy-preserving versions of deep learning models. The AI assistant will be trained on LUMI and validated with the help of a distributed multi-modal world model simultaneously developed by a research group from Japan’s RIKEN.
The basis for CSC’s collaboration with Japan is the Memorandum of Cooperation signed in May 2022 with Japan’s leading HPC center, RIKEN Center for Computational Sciences (R-CCS), which hosts the world’s second most powerful supercomputer, Fugaku (Top500, 11/2022).
– Collaboration with R-CCS provides us a great opportunity to jointly develop our competences and improve the services offered by LUMI and future HPC infrastructures. The scientific projects chosen in the Open Call build an excellent foundation for concrete cooperation activities, while simultaneously allowing Finnish researchers to leverage LUMI’s resources and broaden their own networks in Japan, states Kimmo Koski, Managing Director of CSC.
The Finland-Japan projects, having started in February 2023, are only the first to be realised under the broader global collaboration efforts and will be complemented by similar projects with counterparts in the US. An Open Call for Expressions of Interests for research collaboration between Finland and the State of Colorado closed at the end of November 2022, with the projects selected in the call envisioned to start in June 2023.
This article was first published on 20 March by CSC.
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