The BIH - Center for Digital Health @ Charité supports research by providing computing infrastructures to meet research demands. Through the de.NBI Cloud @ BIH and the de.NBI Clinical Cloud @ Charité, a range of services are offered for various research use cases, including web services, secure data processing, and high-performance data analysis.
Services are provided through standard cloud models:
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): For users requiring direct control over their environment, IaaS provides access to fundamental computing resources. Users can provision and manage virtual machines and build custom workflows and data analysis pipelines on the provided infrastructure.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS): PaaS offerings facilitate application development and deployment, reducing infrastructure management tasks for users. Key PaaS offerings include:
- JupyterHub Environments: Access de.NBI Cloud resources for JupyterHub-based platforms, intended for collaborative research projects.
- Managed Kubernetes Deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications. The Kubernetes control plane for user clusters is centrally managed, while worker nodes are provisioned from the user's cluster control plane into an OpenStack project. This setup provides Kubernetes capabilities while managing aspects of cluster operation.
- Software as a Service (SaaS): To provide ready-to-use environments, the SimpleVM solution via the de.NBI Cloud offers researchers preconfigured environments like RStudio or JupyterLab. These are accessible directly through a web browser, reducing the need for manual setup.
Support for Sensitive Data
The de.NBI Clinical Cloud @ Charité is provided for research involving sensitive data. It offers a secure environment with compute capabilities (including GPU resources) and dedicated storage solutions. This platform supports AI projects, including those involving large language models (LLMs) and federated learning, while adhering to data privacy and compliance requirements.
Contribution to Federated Data Ecosystems
Both the de.NBI Cloud @ BIH and the de.NBI Clinical Cloud @ Charité contribute to the Health-X dataspace, an initiative within the Health domain of the Gaia-X ecosystem. This contributes to secure, interoperable data sharing and collaborative research.