Platform R: Template Language for Grants and IRBs

Let us know if there is additional information that would be useful to you in your grant or IRB submissions.

For Grants

"Computational workflows for this project will be supported by Platform R, an on-premise, HIPAA-compliant high-performance computing (HPC) environment custom-engineered for the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health (SMPH). The cluster architecture provides over 26,000 compute cores, system memory configurations scaling up to 3 TiB of high-speed DDR5 RAM, and dedicated hardware acceleration via NVIDIA L40S and H200 GPUs. Data management and high-throughput workflows are sustained by a CephFS distributed storage system that provides over 1 PB of fast, NVMe-backed scratch storage."

For IRBs

"Platform R is a secure, on-premises, high-performance computing research environment managed by the UW–Madison School of Medicine and Public Health (SMPH) Informatics & IT teams. It is approved and designed for use with HIPAA and restricted data workloads, having completed a formal UW-Madison Risk Assessment, and its network and systems infrastructure are modeled after NIST 800-223 HPC reference architecture best-practices. Platform R provides access to high-memory CPU and GPU servers, high-speed networking, and encrypted central storage."

"Access is restricted to approved users, who have completed the required yearly SMPH HIPAA privacy and security training. Identity and Access Management is controlled through UW NetID/MFA."

"Data cannot be removed from Platform R except through approved export processes that follow SMPH data governance requirements. Platform R ensures that research data remains protected throughout analysis by enforcing least-privilege access and by managing infrastructure under secure DevOps practices."

Changing storage locations

UW-IRB stated they do not require a change of protocol to state that data was in a secure location in a department and is moving to a different secure storage location managed by SMPH IT. Because it is moving from one secure platform to another, it would not affect the IRB review. If the study team is submitting a required change of protocol for other reasons, they can also include the data storage change as part of that change.

Example of change in storage location: The IRB-approved protocol states that they are storing data using Department of Medicine secure storage, and as part of the consolidation of resources for IT it is moving to either Platform X Azure secure data enclave or Platform R High Performance Computing Cluster.

Template language

"Data will be on storage managed or approved by SMPH IT."