ABCI 3.0: Evolution of the leading AI infrastructure in Japan

ABCI 3.0 is the latest version of the ABCI, a large-scale open AI infrastructure that AIST has been operating since August 2018 and will be fully operational in January 2025. ABCI 3.0 consists of computing servers equipped with 6128 of the NVIDIA H200 GPUs and an all-flash storage system. Its peak performance is 6.22 exaflops in half precision and 3.0 exaflops in single precision, which is 7 to 13 times faster than the previous system, ABCI 2.0. It also more than doubles both storage capacity and theoretical read/write performance. ABCI 3.0 is expected to accelerate research and development, evaluation, and workforce development of cutting-edge AI technologies, with a particular focus on generative AI.

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.