Researchers from Europe and Japan can now access a larger pool of supercomputers and run simulations with unprecedented complexity. This is the starting point of the recently launched EuroHPC JU research project. European and Japanese research centers will work together to address global issues, focusing on climate, biomedical, and materials sciences.

The HANAMI project (HPC Alliance for Applications and Supercomputing Innovation) builds on the EU-Japan Digital Partnership by bringing together research teams representing excellence in high-performance computing in both regions. The project will bring researchers who are far away closer together. By pooling talents and resources to carry out large-scale simulations and analyses, we can tackle global challenges more effectively through facilitated access and cooperation.

“Europe and Japan have a long history of building supercomputers, with a strong co-design experience with its industrial ecosystem. However, being a major actor in High-Performance Computing (HPC) requires many high-end skills, from the hardware to the scientific application development and optimization. Both sides have a unique ecosystem of top-level researchers in HPC that goes from the research infrastructures towards extreme-scale simulations," explained France Boillod-Cerneux, a researcher at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), who coordinates the HANAMI project.

France Boillod-Cerneux pointed out that now, the “gold” in HPC is “not so much the supercomputer itself, but the ecosystem in which the supercomputer belongs”: that’s because with mixed workflows, embedding intensive data analytics, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing, the key point is access to the complete "computing chain”.

According to Rui Oliveira, a professor at the University of Minho and director at the Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology, and Science (INESC TEC), the HANAMI project can be "an excellent opportunity" for all project partners to establish "a valuable partnership" with Japanese institutions in supercomputing. In this sense, the project aims to advise and promote sustainable collaboration between Europe and Japan for the benefit of the HPC community and Japan.

The Japanese machines can even “open new possibilities for the European scientific applications," added Boillod-Cerneux. HANAMI ties together the complete HPC chain mastered by Europe and Japan and can be a "vehicle" for creating synergies. The project will enable European and Japanese codes to perform on different architectures, supporting and testing workflows to assess and improve computational performance, scientific quality and accuracy, and replicability of experiments.

Several European applications (in biomedical and materials sciences, for example) can now take advantage of the famous Fugaku supercomputer, one of the first that currently ranks number four in the list of the 500 most powerful computer systems.

Led by CEA, HANAMI welcomes 15 partners from nine European countries and six European Centers of Excellence (CoE) for HPC applications on board (MaX, EoCoE, TREX, RAISE, EsiWACE, and PerMedCoE). The RIKEN (Institute of Physical and Chemical Research), the University of Tokyo, and the RCAST (Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology) are Japan's representatives, with more than nine Japanese partners. The three-year project started in March 2024 and has a budget of up to €5 million from Horizon Europe, granted through EuroHPC JU.

Cooperation between researchers from both regions can help address challenges ranging from climate modeling to biomedical or materials science. But HANAMI’s scope can go further: “This group is just one example of the various applications that supercomputing can have in the daily lives of ordinary citizens," indicated Rui Oliveira.

"In the context of climate warming," France Boillod-Cerneux highlighted, "weather and climate models are especially strategic areas for Europe and Japan, so the scientific applications must provide trustworthy results; here, the replicability is a key point." In other words, the outcomes of a climate model simulation should remain consistent regardless of the supercomputer used, including both hardware and software: "Weather forecasting and climate modeling, personalized medicine, or astrophysics are examples of applications that will benefit from the exaflop scale."

HANAMI’s first high-level symposium will delve into these strategic areas. In Barcelona, at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, between 13 and 15 January 2025, the project’s leading scientists will discuss how HPC can solve global challenges and tackle transversal topics such as benchmarking and best practices regarding HPC and AI.

HANAMI received funding from the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No. 101136269.