NAREGI originally started as an R&D project funded by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT ). It started in 2003, and will end later this year. In total a budget of 2 billion yen has been put into the project. NAREGI is a collaboration with the National Labs, several universities and large industrial companies in Japan.

According to Kenichi Miura, NAREGI has been redirected as a part of the Next Generation Supercomputer Development Project.

The goal of NAREGI is to develop a Grid Software System as the prototype of future Grid Infrastructure in scientific research in Japan and to provide a testbed to prove that the high-end Grid computing environment can be practically utilized for Nano-science applications over the Japanese research network SINET3. NAREGI also participates in international collaborations on interoperability issues with organisations in the USA, Europe and Asia Pacific. NAREGI also contributes to standardization activities in, for instance, the OGF.

The first complete version of the NAREGI software stack (version 1.0) is expected later this year. The goal is to have a robust and maintainable set of software. The NAREGI testbed, phase 1, contains some 3000 CPU's with an aggregated computational power of 17 tflop/s.

NAREGI is also a step towards a petascale computing environment for scientific research. Just like in other parts of the world, also in Japan one sees a new information infrastructure is needed in order to boost today's advanced scientific research. In Japan they call that "Cyber Science Infrastructure". It will integrate information resources and systems, including supercomputers and high-performance computing systems. It will also include databases and digital content such as e-journals and "human" and research processes.

The Cyber Science Infrastructure is similar to inititatives in the US and the e-Infrastructures in Europe. A five year plan has been developed, started last year, that will culminate in the new operational infrastructure in 2011.