The University of Osaka's D3 Center begins trial operation of new NEC Supercomputer

In September, the D3 Center at the University of Osaka (Ibaraki City, Osaka Prefecture; Director: Daisuke Furihata) began trial operation of the supercomputer (compute and data platform) "OCTOPUS (Osaka university Compute and sTOrage Platform Urging open Science)" built by NEC to promote open science. Full-scale operation will begin in December.

"OCTOPUS" is a supercomputer with a theoretical computing performance of 2,293 petaflops, centered on 140 computing nodes of the "NEC LX201Ein-1." Not only does it have approximately 1.5 times the performance of the previous system, it is also equipped with a provenance management function jointly developed by both parties that automatically records and manages processes such as data generation, contributing to the promotion of open science where research data is shared across society as a whole. The Center expects to start offering this provenance management function in December.

In recent academic research, vast amounts of data are analyzed and generated daily on supercomputers. However, the research processes and results are often left to manual recording and management by researchers, and issues have been pointed out concerning reproducibility, fairness, and efficiency. Additionally, from the perspective of promoting open science, there is a demand for greater transparency in the research process and the implementation of an audit trail management system.

In response to these challenges, a research group led by Director Date of the Joint Research Laboratory for Integrated Infrastructure of High Performance Computing and Data Analysis—established in 2021 by the D3 Center and NEC—developed SCUP-HPC, a new technology for recording and managing computing provenance executed on supercomputers.

This is a technology that records, manages, and visualizes computing provenance—tracking what data is accessed by which programs and what data is generated—in cluster-type supercomputers where multiple high-performance computing machines are connected by high-speed networks, while minimizing the impact on supercomputer performance.

This enables "Scientific Computing Unifying Provenance—High Performance Computing," which integrates computing provenance on supercomputers. It is expected to dramatically improve the productivity of researchers who use scientific computing supercomputers for simulations, AI training, and other purposes.

Furthermore, through the use of provenance management and search services by SCUP-HPC, authorized users will be able to search using provenance IDs and confirm visualized computing provenance.

This will make it possible to confirm that research results were computed on OCTOPUS by including the computing provenance ID in paper acknowledgments, helping to ensure the integrity of academic research.

NEC plans to commercialize a provenance management system for supercomputers utilizing SCUP-HPC in the future.