The HANAMI project: Digital partnership between the EU and Japan

HANAMI brings together leading HPC institutions from Europe and Japan to strengthen and improve HPC through the joint development of applications and the exchange of information and expertise. A central aspect is the user-driven development of HPC applications in relevant research areas. HANAMI focuses on the fields of climate simulation, materials research and biomedicine, where scientific cooperation between Europe and Japan is already established.

The HANAMI project started on March 1, 2024 and will be funded by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking for three years. The project does not focus on developing new scientific software, but rather on European and Japanese scientists porting their existing codes to each other's HPC systems, which are quite different in terms of architecture. Furthermore, the performance is tested on these systems with the aim to ensure that applications can also be used on such alternative computer architectures.

In contrast to many of the world's most powerful supercomputers, Japan's Fugaku, for example, is not based on GPUs, but on a large number of computer nodes with ARM processors and vector units. European researchers can thus adapt their codes, which might be optimized for the use of GPUs, to the Japanese system architecture and investigate their scalability. At the same time, Japanese researchers can examine their codes on the GPU-based technologies of the fastest computers in Europe.

DKRZ is primarily involved in work package 4, in which Japanese and European expertise is to be pooled in order to improve program codes for weather and climate models. Dr. Joachim Biercamp for DKRZ and Dr. Maio Acosta for the Barcelona Supercomputing Center are jointly leading the work package.