Purposes of this unit
This unit has three purposes below:
- Intramural research exchange between computational science and computer science
- Cultivation of next-generation researchers in computational science
- Functions as a base of contact with researchers or organizations in computational science outside Kyoto University
Exchange between Computational Science and Computer Science
The Study of supercomputers is often classified into two categories: Computational Science and Computer Science. The purposes of computational science are to understand, predict, or optimize specific objects of computation such as natural phenomena or artifacts. On the other hand, computer science concentrates on fundamental or applied theory of mathematics and information science to use computers effectively. The unit of computational science is striving for cooperation between researchers in common fields of computational science and computer science while promoting exchange among highly specialized fields of computational science.
Cultivation of next-generation researchers in computational science
To cultivate excellent human resources who support the future of computational science and contribute to the society, the unit offers lectures and seminars of various topics from basic theories of computational science and computer science to state-of-the-art research. A course open to all majors, “Introduction to Computational Science,” explains how helpful to various fields computational science is.
On the other hand, the unit offers graduate students wide-range lectures and seminars such as foundation of parallel programming, solution algorithm, discretization method, computation of matrix eigenvalues, or application of advanced computational science.
The figure above describes the image of courses the unit offers. Course 1 are more oriented to computational science, while Course 3 are more oriented to computer science. This unit is offering courses that cover various fields as above.
Functions as a base of contact with researchers or organizations outside Kyoto University
Now that competition of developing next generation of 10-peta FLOPS scale supercomputers is intensifying, highly specialized computational science has to change according to its computational environment. To promote cooperation with educational or research activities in computational science outside Kyoto University, this unit functions as a base of contact as below:
- to cooperate with improvement efforts infrastructure for developing next-generation supercomputer as national project
- to actively promote joint researches in fields of application such as very large-scale numerical calculation as a base of shared use of interdisciplinary large-scale information infrastructure and joint research network, which has been conducted at eight universities since 2010
- to exchange credits or teachers with other universities or research institutes concerning education of computational science. As one of the exchange activities, the unit concluded an agreement with Graduate School of System Informatics at Kobe University and has a cooperative course.
