HOKKAIDO UNIVERSITY INFORMATION INITIATIVE CENTER

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Message from the director

Masaharu Munetomo, Director, Information Initiative Center

 The mission of the Hokkaido University Information Initiative Center is to facilitate informatization at the University through R&D, as well as through maintenance and operations of the information infrastructure, thereby promoting the advancement of education and research, etc., and to implement and support education using information media. In the six divisions that constitute the Center—the Supercomputing Research Division, the Information Network Research Division, the Digital Content Research Division, the Media Education Research Division, the System Design Research Division, and the Cyber Security Research Division—R&D making the most of the characteristics of individual divisions is being promoted. In addition, the Cyber Security Center and ICT Planning and Technical Advisory Office established within the Center are promoting R&D activities aimed at realizing safer, more secure, higher-performance and more convenient information infrastructure at the University, in close collaboration with the ICT Security Office of the University.

 Designated as an organization constituting the network of the Joint Usage/Research Center for Interdisciplinary Large-scale Information Infrastructures (JHPCN), the Center has been developing and operating the “interdisciplinary large-scale computer system” comprised of a supercomputer system and an inter-cloud system to support leading-edge interdisciplinary collaborative research, and has been also supporting a wide range of collaborative research in the fields of computational science, computer science, and their applications, as a system component institution that provides supercomputer computing resources to the High Performance Computing Infrastructure (HPCI) in Japan.

 The National University Corporation which includes Hokkaido University has entered the Fourth Period of Mid-Term Goals and Mid-Term Plan this fiscal year. During that period, the realization of digital transformation (DX) is one of the major issues, and the expansion of the information infrastructure, which is essential for this purpose, is required. The interdisciplinary large-scale computer system of the Center has always been short of computer resources, which has been an obstacle to conducting research. Assuming the increase in demand required for the future promotion of DX, a significant performance enhancement should be achieved. Furthermore, it is especially important to promote data-driven research using artificial intelligence and other technologies, in addition to large-scale scientific and technological computations centered on computational simulations. We are planning to closely link the supercomputer system and the inter-cloud system we have built and operated with the large-capacity storage infrastructure and ultra-high-speed networks, and significantly enhance them as a system infrastructure capable of responding to new research needs during the Fourth Period of Mid-Term Goals and Mid-Term Plan. In addition, since the promotion of international collaborative research utilizing the interdisciplinary large-scale computer system is cited as one of the goals for the Fourth Period of Mid-Term Goals and Mid-Term Plan, we are also planning to promote international collaboration and joint research with researchers overseas.

 Research DX is not only about digitalization but also about the transformation of the research method itself. A related task force of the University has been discussing such transformation, and we believe we should go back to the root of the issue once and for all in order to realize DX. Considering what we, researchers of the University, are studying for, how our research activities overlap with and differ from those of public institutions and private companies, how we can encourage undergraduate and graduate students to actively engage in research activities, and how we can return our results to society as a whole, in order to clarify roles of institutions of higher education, and contemplating how the Center can support all of those research activities at the University, we will discuss the improvement of the system environment, service provision and establishment of human support system in the future. We look forward to your continued guidance and cooperation both inside and outside the University.

Masaharu Munetomo
Director, Information Initiative Center
November 1, 2022