Week 5: Travelling

Now that the midterm week is over, I can relax a bit. This week’s topic will be “travelling”
! I have surprisingly been able to travel to many places (especially on the weekends) so I will compile them all here. First off, I will talk about the school trip we had! We went to Kobe to sight-see something extremely cool — one of the world’s fastest computers, the K Computer! This bad boy is packed with more than 700,000 CPU cores and has a computational power of a bit over 600 TFlop/s! That’s very VERY VERY fast. The name comes from the Japanese character, 京 (けい）, meaning 10 quadrillion. What’s cool about this computer is that it is used for many simulations, one of which, is the simulation of typhoons and earthquakes to help Japan prepare for upcoming natural disasters. It is also used in many medical applications. Researchers can borrow a small percentage of the computer’s power for their research and is done on a yearly basis to the most interesting project pitch. The kicker here is that whoever gets granted access will be able to use a portion of the K computer’s processing power for FREE. Truly remarkable.

Besides the K computer, we also visited the nearby electron accelerator at Riken Laboratory. I couldn’t get a good picture of the accelerator because not only is it ginormous, it’s surrounded by tons of small research labs. However, I did get a picture of a small cutout of the inside of pipe in which the electron gets accelerated using magnets! The special thing about Riken Lab’s electron accelerator is that they initially accelerate it using a 2 km long tube that then shoots the electron into the circular accelerator that we see in movies.

After seeing these, we went to Kobe’s downtown area and ate at a very delicious buffet and had some free time to walk around the mall and do touristy things.

The mall consisted of two sides — one was more of a modern take on the traditional Japanese style open-street shopping street (top) and the other was a more typical kind of mall we see today (bottom).

There was a Toys-R-Us in this mall and it was interesting to see all the different kinds of toys they sold in there compared to the ones they sold in the U.S. I’m not too sure what is sold in our Toys-R-Us’ these days, but the popular toys in Japan’s Toys-R-Us seemed to be mostly Beyblades (Japanese dreidel-like toys) and mecha-related toys. There were, of course, many Lego things as well!

From the mall, we were able to get a very nice view of the Kobe bay. You can see the red Kobe Port Tower which, compared to Tokyo or Kyoto Tower, seems a bit small. Next to it is the Kobe Technology museum which I wasn’t able to get a chance to explore.

Now to travel back in time…!

Earlier last week me and a couple of fellow UCEAP students met up together over the long weekend and went to Universal Studios Japan!