mdx: A Cloud Platform for Supporting Data Science and Cross-Disciplinary Research Collaborations
This provides a practical infrastructure solution for researchers in various disciplines needing cloud-based data science tools, though it is incremental as it builds on existing cloud and virtualization technologies.
The authors tackled the need for a flexible, secure cloud platform to support data science and cross-disciplinary research by building and launching mdx, a nation-wide platform jointly operated by 11 institutions in Japan, which is currently used by researchers across multiple domains such as materials informatics and life science.
The growing amount of data and advances in data science have created a need for a new kind of cloud platform that provides users with flexibility, strong security, and the ability to couple with supercomputers and edge devices through high-performance networks. We have built such a nation-wide cloud platform, called "mdx" to meet this need. The mdx platform's virtualization service, jointly operated by 9 national universities and 2 national research institutes in Japan, launched in 2021, and more features are in development. Currently mdx is used by researchers in a wide variety of domains, including materials informatics, geo-spatial information science, life science, astronomical science, economics, social science, and computer science. This paper provides an the overview of the mdx platform, details the motivation for its development, reports its current status, and outlines its future plans.