[Beowulf] confidential data on public HPC cluster

[Ashley Pittman]

On 1 Mar 2010, at 19:08, Jonathan Dursi wrote:

> These are all good things to keep in mind.
> 
> There must be people out there with users who do biomed work with its attendant confidentiality issues, or users who work on commercial confidential data sets -- engineering or otherwise.

When we put this very question to the medical ethics board the conclusion was that it was ok to send patient data (3d scans in this case) over the wider academic network as long as the data was not traceable to an individual patient.  I don't think confidentially of data was ever assumed as it's very difficult to do with shared resources, merely care was taken that the data would not be of potential use to 3rd parties.  As I recall the concern was about the data initially leaving the hospital, once it had done that there was little distinction between it being on a cluster or traveling over the wire somewhere to get there.

Ashley.

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Ashley Pittman, Bath, UK.

Padb - A parallel job inspection tool for cluster computing
http://padb.pittman.org.uk