NORTRE - national collaboration for federated access to secure HPC

About

Working on highly sensitive research data is challenging and is often hindered by both legal and technical obstacles. It requires not just secure data storage, but also secure data processing, and a secure collaborative platform. The purpose of this talk is to show how the University of Oslo (UiO), the University of Bergen (UiB) and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim are working together to provide federated access to centralised secure HPC. Each university has its own trusted research environment (TRE). UiO has services for sensitive data (TSD), UiB has Safe, and NTNU has HuntCloud. Each TRE is developed in-house over several years, and offer scalable, secure storage and data processing software in a secure environment. However, only TSD has its own compute cluster, for running jobs on large collections of sensitive data. By establishing trust and using APIs for data migration between the TREs, users will be able to send compute jobs directly to the TSD cluster from within one of the other two TREs. Through this, the users get the best of all three worlds, and an easier way of collaborating across platforms, without building a grand new solution, but instead linking existing secure research platforms.