On Friday, SMU, A*Star and Fujitsu signed a Master Research Collaboration Agreement (MRCA) at Fusionopolis. Under the MRCA, a five-year partnership which builds on the Fujitsu-A*STAR MoU signed in Japan in March 2013, the parties will invest S$54 million in an Urban Computing and Engineering Centre of Excellence in Singapore to work together in addressing the multitude of challenges highly urbanised cities frequently face. The Centre's objective is to harness high-performance computing capabilities to develop solutions for sustainable urban operations such as crowd mobility and transport engineering, with researchers using Singapore as a "living lab" to test-bed next generation solutions to real urban issues.