mdx: A Cloud Platform for Supporting Data Science and Cross-Disciplinary Research Collaborations

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.

Perturbative GAN: GAN with Perturbation Layers

Perturbative GAN, which replaces convolution layers of existing convolutional GANs (DCGAN, WGAN-GP, BIGGAN, etc.) with perturbation layers that adds a fixed noise mask, is proposed. Compared with the convolu-tional GANs, the number of parameters to be trained is smaller, the convergence of training is faster, the incep-tion score of generated images is higher, and the overall training cost is reduced. Algorithmic generation of the noise masks is also proposed, with which the training, as well as the generation, can be boosted with hardware acceleration. Perturbative GAN is evaluated using con-ventional datasets (CIFAR10, LSUN, ImageNet), both in the cases when a perturbation layer is adopted only for Generators and when it is introduced to both Generator and Discriminator.