Mercier Guillaume
I'm currently a third year student in computer sciences at the Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon (France). I came at the Tsukuba Research Center of the Real World Computing Partnership for the three-month training period that concludes my second year of computer sciences in France.
I'm also a student in Japanese language and culture. Coming here was a great occasion to live few months in this country and to work for a while in a "total Japanese" environment. It gave me the opportunity to make some contacts among the computer scientists community too. There a only few links between French and Japanese computer scientists communities, and I think that those links should be increased and strengthened. Believe me or not, but I was not the only person interested in coming to Japan for this summer training period among my promotion's comrades. But they couldn't come because they didn't have any contacts. I hope that in the future, more French students will be able to visit Japanese universities or laboratories (and of course, Japanese computer science students coming to France...).
So I was a little bit more lucky than my comrades because I came in Japan and also because working at RWCP was a pleasant experience. It is often said that working in Japan is difficult for foreigners, because of the rules of Japanese society or because of lack of communication. I didn't experience any of those problems here. And as I discussed with other foreigners in the lab, I came to believe that they didn't experience them neither. The working conditions were excellent and the general atmosphere too. I had a lot of conferences from researchers who came to visit the laboratories in Tsukuba, which I found all interesting. I worked for three months in the "Parallel and Distributed System Software Laboratory" on a porting of the HPC++ toolkit library on top of the SCore system Software. Before this training period, I didn't work on HPC++ nor run-time systems and I didn't know the SCore. I did work before on clusters of PCs, but I found the concepts of the SCore very interesting. I'm very confident in the fact that in a near future this kind of technology will be more widespread than it is now and will not be confined only in research laboratories any more.
The fast and huge development of the Internet is on the verge to bring new kind of services and enterprises which will need enough computing power and thus, new kind of computers.
I really enjoyed my work at RWCP and my stay in Japan. I discovered and worked on new computer sciences issues. It has been an interesting and worthy experience. That's why hope coming and working here again.