SUPERCOMPUTING PROGRAMS AND ACTIVITIES FOR COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING IN JAPAN

Two major developments in the infrastructure of the computational science and engineering research in Japan are reviewed. Both of these developments, resulting from the recent construction of a high-speed backbone network and a huge vector parallel computer, will surely change the scene of the computational science and engineering researches. The first one is the ITBL (Information-Technology Based Laboratory) project, where R&D are made to realize a virtual research environment over the network. Here, basic software tools for distributed environments have been developed to solve science and engineering problems. The second one is the Earth Simulator project. In this project, a huge SMP-cluster vector parallel system was developed, which will undoubtedly give a great impact on the numerical simulations in the areas, for example, the climate modeling. Furthermore, activities in largescale numerical simulations, which are carried out in various application fields and have a potential for further integration of the above systems, are presented.