Hideichi Okada Director of the Electronics Policy Division, Machinery and Information Industries Bureau, Ministry of International Trade and Industry

I am very honored to speak to you all at the opening of the 1998 RWC Symposium.

The RWC Project is the biggest among those R&D projects under the control of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), with almost 20 percent of our electronics-related budget being spent on this project. Some 50 laboratories in Japan and other countries are working on this project and more than 250 researchers have made many remarkable achievements so far, some of which will be introduced during this symposium.

Thefigurable LSI was released 10 days ago. At TRC, a PC cluster system in which personal computers are connected to deliver performance equivalent to that of a supercomputer was developed, and staff at the Los Alamos Research Center in the U.S. are particularly interested in this system. The fact that the Agency of Industrial Science and Technology decided to employ a single set of the system for its computer center attracted much attention from the mass media.

Information technology is considered to be one of the hardest to understand among many fields of science and technology while most people are aware of the necessity to invest more in it. So, symposiums like this one will become as important as research and development in order to give people a clearer understanding of our achievements. In this sense, I believe this 1998 RWC Symposium is being held at an appropriate timing. Since information technology changes so quickly and has a very wide range of applications, I know you surely face many difficulties in remaining the world leader in this field. To work on many plans as the core player of new information technology research and development in Japan, the Real World Computing Partnership receives extensive support from many researchers, and the RWCP will continue to rely on support from all of you.

The RWCP is geared not only to the development of information technology in Japan, but also to provide funding from the Japanese government for researchers in other countries, to help them work effectively on creating advanced technologies. To help achieve the goal, MITI will provide as much assistance as possible, and looks forward to your great success.