Trusted CI Webinar: ACCORD: Integrating CI Policy and Mechanism to Support Research on Sensitive Data

Today, a large number of researchers do not have access to secure, compliance-capable research computing infrastructure at their home institutions. Traditional institutional secure CI only supports “in-house” users. The ACCORD project is set up to address the challenge of scaling institutional secure research computing services to support community users. To accomplish this goal, we are deploying a policy-centric cyberinfrastructure that prioritizes security, compliance, and accessibility. In this presentation, we describe ACCORD’s approach of leveraging the latest CI tools to compartmentalize research environments into reusable containers that can be catalogued and managed. For example, we rely on InCommon federation to streamline user authentication hurdles, COmanage to lessen user onboarding and management difficulties, and containers coupled with a web-driven interface to alleviate the user accessibility burden. The challenge is to, hopefully, hit the right levels of simplicity and security for a variety of users. In this presentation we will also share the current project status, lessons learned, and future goals. Discussion will be welcome.NSF Grant # 1920430NSF Grant # 1919667Ope