Dr. Tadashi Watanabe

A Japanese computer engineer, he is the project manager of the RIKEN Next-Generation Supercomputer R&D Center. Before joining RIKEN in 2006, he joined the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) and served as Director for Research Promotion of MEXT as a project leader of the Next Generation Supercomputer Project. In 1968 he joined NEC Corporation where he played a central role in the development of the NEC SX architecture and was engaged in the development of large-scale computers until December, 2005. He was the chief designer of SX-2, the first supercomputer introduced by NEC in 1983, which boasted the world's fastest speed at the time. NEC Corporation is one of the world's leading providers of Internet, broadband network and enterprise business solutions dedicated to meeting the specialized needs of its diverse and global base of customers. He is also widely-recognized as being an instrumental force working closely with the team at Fujitsu in developing the world?s most powerful supercomputer, the K computer, which is rated at 10.51 petaflops on the Linpack benchmark and held the number one slot on the TOP500 list in 2011. He holds a B.E. degree in Electronic Engineering and an M.E. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tokyo in Japan. He earned his Ph.D. in Information Science at the University of Tohoku located in Sendai, Miyagi in the Tōhoku Region of Japan. He was awarded the IEEE Computer Society?s Eckert?Mauchly Award in 1998 for, ?contributions to the architectural design of supercomputers with multiple/parallel vector pipelines and programmable vector caches's fastest supercomputer from 2002 to 2004?. He was also awarded the Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award in 2006; being the first Japanese individual to receive this award, for playing a central role in the successive development of the SX Series and "the Earth Simulator", which was certified as the world's fastest supercomputer for three years running from 2002 to 2004. NEC's SX Series and the Earth Simulator both of which employ the vector principle that was invented by Seymour Cray.