NAISS SENS and Bianca

Objectives

• We’ll briefly get an overview of kinds of sensitive data

• … and the Bianca system

The Bianca workshop

• Bianca workshop material

• Next time given later this spring

Instructor note

• Approx timing: 14.45-15.30 (15 min Coffee break)

  • Can perhaps be squeezed to 15 minutes after the coffee break

• Information

See also

• Bianca portal: http://docs.uppmax.uu.se/cluster_guides/bianca_portal/

Sensitive personal data

• https://www.snic.se/allocations/snic-sens/

• Traced to now living persons, e.g.

  • human genomic data

  • images/videos containing persons

  • health registry (health data records from healthcare providers)

• More about sensitive data

  • GDPR

  • Data protection

  • Skydd av personuppgifter

• When in doubt, contact your university’s data protection officer.

• Generally, there must be a Data Processing Agreement between UU and the data controlling university.

Apply for project

Open NAISS SENS Rounds

Bianca

• Bianca is a great platform for computationally intensive research on sensitive personal data. It can also be useful for:

  • national and international collaboration on sensitive personal data (without a high compute need)

  • other types of sensitive data

• Bianca is not good for:

  • storing data

  • publishing data

    • unless the dataset is very popular among Bianca users, e.g. Swegen, SIMPLER

Bianca’s design

• Bianca was designed to:

  • make accidental data leaks difficult

  • make correct data management as easy as possible

  • emulate the HPC cluster environment that SNIC/NAISS users were familiar with

  • provide a maximum amount of resources

  • satisfy regulations.

Bianca has no Internet

… but we have “solutions”

• Bianca is only accessible from within Sunet (i.e. from university networks).

• Use VPN outside Sunet. Link to VPN for UU

  • You can get VPN credentials from all Swedish universities.

• The whole Bianca cluster (blue) contains hundreds of virtual project clusters (green), each of which is isolated from each other and the Internet.

• Data can be transferred to or from a virtual project cluster through the Wharf, which is a special file area that is visible from the Internet.

See also

• Bianca portal in documentation

• ThinLinc

• Data transfers

• Software

Introduction course

• Overview

• Log in

• Command-line intro

• Module system

• Transfering files

• More on NAISS-SENS

• The compute nodes

• Software and package installation

Keypoints

• If you handle sensitive data, apply for a NAISS-SENS project

• SENS projects will get accounts on Bianca

• Bianca has no internet itself but there are solutions like:

  • wharf

  • transit server

  • many installed software

• Ask support if you need additional software tools