This Educational Trip, held on March 30 – April 4, 2014 at Tokyo – Osaka, Japan.

To visit the universities and study their cultures, technologies, cuisine, and transportations.

Japanese Cuisine

    

Transportation

  

Costume

 

Archaeological Site

    

Geographic and Environment

    

Internship Interview with Prof. from Nagahama Institute of Bio-Science and Technology University

  

And we also visited 

 

Tokyo Institute of Technology

On the second day of our educational trip to Japan, we visited Tokyo Institute of Technology. There, they showed us their supercomputer, called TSUBAME. With 5.787 petaflops, I approximated that it has around a million more computational power and storage than personal computers.

Tokyo Institute of Technology keeps improving TSUBAME. Now at version 2.5, it is twice faster than version 2.0, uses less space, and are developed for more energy efficiency.

    

They also have a variant of TSUBAME called TSUBAME-KFC which submerges the computers inside liquid oil to regulate temperatures in an energy efficient manner.

We also learned there about the uses of such supercomputer. They are often used to perform simulations for researches and developments in science and engineering, such as water, weather and air-flow simulation. These simulations are normally too large, too complex, or requires too much precision to be run on a personal computer.

  

I am impressed by their presentation of the TSUBAME supercomputer. They have a big room with a very big television screen, presenting their prepared VTR. Then they showed us a TSUBAME rack, they opened it and let us look inside, they showed the wiring that goes under the ground by plucking up a tile. Then they took us to the data storage room. Finally, they showed us the TSUBAME-KFC, which is a computer submerged in a special liquid for cooling.

National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (Miraikan) 

Miraikan is a national museum that displays the current state of technology, and how technology will be in the future. It also gave me the feeling similar to that of visiting the Science Museum in Thailand. It shows the cutting-edge innovations, or prediction of how the future world would be like. It also shows a demonstration of Honda’s ASIMO robot, or how computers can combine our personal information to do interesting things, including composing songs based on our information.

  

By speculating the future, it brings the future innovations nearer to the present, which may accelerate the development of such innovation.

Daiwa House Industry Central Laboratory

When we visited Daiwa House, they showed us many innovations that they developed to make better houses, such as one to reduce the shaking of house during earthquake, to control house temperature automatically, a smart house that can be controlled via an iOS application, a soundproofed room that still sounds good, an isolated house for planting that retains constant environmental parameters.

 

Daiwa House showed us how a homebuilding company also does research projects to improve the quality of life of households and other people.

With technology, research and development, we can solve everyday problem using new innovations. Daiwa House Laboratory showed just this—how they use technology to solve real world problems that affect many people.

 

Daiwa House Laboratory is a must see. Their technologies look very concrete and very applicable to people’s everyday life, not something concrete and very far away from people’s life. It made all of us go wow.

Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST)

When we went to NAIST, after eating at their cafeteria, we had an introductory talk, followed by a visit at the robotics lab. There, they showed several of their robots, giving us demonstrations.

 

Later, other Thai students there gave us a talk of how they live their lives as a graduate students at NAIST. We also met our friends who are currently doing their internship at NAIST, and discussed about their life doing internship at NAIST.