1. An account is required to use mdx
To use mdx, you need to acquire an account with the Academic Access Management Federation in Japan (GakuNin), which has been jointly set up by universities and the National Institute of Informatics. Please see “Identify Provider: IdP” on the GakuNin Participants page to check whether your organization is a participating member of GakuNin.
To use mdx with your GakuNin ID, you need to configure the settings for sending the attributes of the required GakuNin IdP. Please contact the person in charge of GakuNin within your organization to check whether these settings have been configured.
To acquire the settings for sending the attributes of GakuNin IdP, please contact the person in charge of GakuNin for information on the IdP administrator of mdx (Platform for the Data-Driven Future), which can be found in “Service Providers: SP” on the Participants page.
For organizations such as private corporations that are not eligible to issue GakuNin ID, we will issue an mdx Original Account. Please submit an application for this type of account using the Application Form for mdx Original Account. Note: To ensure that the form is displayed properly and works correctly, we recommend using Google Chrome (latest version) or Safari (latest version).
2. Application to use mdx
Before using mdx, please read the Terms of Use and provide the necessary information, such as how you plan to use it and the amount of resources required, via the Project Application Portal. The application will be reviewed by the administrator of a partner organization. If the application is approved, the application status will be displayed as “Approved” in the list of project applications. You can check the status of the project for which you applied in the Project Application List window.
| Project type | Main use |
|---|---|
| Trial | A project designed to evaluate in advance the environment in which mdx is used. mdx can be used for three months. |
| Normal | You can apply for a project on a CPU or GPU core basis. When applying for a project, you can specify the quantity of resources you are likely to need. The organization administrator reviews the application to determine whether the purpose of use and the specified amount of resources are appropriate. |
| Secure (Node occupancy) | You can apply for a project on a generic node or computation accelerator (GPU) node basis. Due to limitations on resources, the application may be rejected for reasons of its purpose of use and the amount of resources requested, or may be put on hold until the resources are available. When applying for a project, please note that due to the sensitive nature of some information, such as personal information, you should consider using a secure project if you regard security as important. In a normal virtual machine (VM), the tenants are isolated from one another by the hypervisor. In a secure node network, the tenant is isolated from other tenants by the hypervisor and the functionality of the network that can be configured only by the mdx administrator. Since resources are allocated on a node basis, many resources are exclusively allocated to the project. For this reason, a secure node is a valuable resource. To ensure high security, it is important not only to use a secure node, but also to configure it. |
3. Running a project
Once the project is approved, you can log in via the User Portal, create a virtual machine that employs the resources allocated to the project, and install the applications to be used in the project.
To allow multiple administrators to manage the project, you need to add users to the User Portal. The project administrators can create, start and stop a virtual machine.
Information for GakuNin Administrators
mdx allows authentication using the Academic Access Management Federation in Japan (GakuNin) operated by the National Institute of Informatics(NII). If you set up your organization’s IdP to allow the use of mdx, users who can authenticate with the organization’s IdP will be able to use mdx. Please refer to the setting information for mdx (Entity ID, attribute) on the SP list of the Gakuin website. After completing the settings, please check if you can access the Project Application Portal and User Portal with the GakuNin ID.