Japan's University of Osaka D3 Center is trialing a new data and compute platform designed to promote open science.

Dubbed the Osaka University Compute and sTOrage Platform Urging open Science (OCTOPUS), the trial started this month, and will see full-scale operations beginning in December.

OCTOPUS was developed by NEC Corporation. The solution has a theoretical computational performance of 2.293 petaflops, with around 140 computing nodes of the "NEC LX201Ein-1," each equipped with two 6th-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and large-capacity storage. According to NEC, it provides around 1.5x the performance of the previous system at the D3 Center.

The system has a provenance management function that automatically records and manages processes, including data generation. This will contribute to "open science," with research data shared. The provenance function will commence in December 2025.

According to NEC, academic research increasingly involves the daily analysis and generation of vast amounts of data using supercomputers. Typically, this needs to be manually recorded.

To get around this, a research group led by Susumu Date, director at The Joint Research Laboratory for Integrated Infrastructure of High Performance Computing and Data Analysis, and established by the D3 Center and NEC, developed the SCUP-HPC (Scientific Computing Unifying Provenance – High Performance Computing), which tracks, records, manages, and visualizes computational provenance in cluster-type supercomputers.

In the announcement, both the University of Osaka D3 Center and NEC committed to continuing to promote the "introduction and utilization of next-generation high-performance servers as a foundation for industrial applications and AI/big data utilization, in addition to traditional supercomputer application areas, thereby contributing to cutting-edge technological development."

The University of Osaka D3 Center, according to its website, provides "large-scale computer systems as a national joint-use facility where scientists and researchers can perform computation and information processing accompanied by academic research and education." The center also operates the MDX II and SQUID clusters, and the ONION aggregation platform.

NEC Corporation is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. The company was founded in 1899.