As medicine becomes more data-intensive, Medical Science DMZ eyed as secure solution

Like other sciences, medical research is generating increasingly large datasets as doctors track health trends, the spread of diseases, genetic causes of illness and the like. Effectively using this data for efforts ranging from stopping the spread of deadly viruses to creating precision medicine treatments for individuals will be greatly accelerated by the secure sharing of the data, while also protecting individual privacy.

In a paper published Friday, Oct. 6 by the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, a group of researchers led by Sean Peisert of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) wrote that the Science DMZ architecture developed for moving large data sets quick and securely could be adapted to meet the needs of the medical research community.

“You can’t just take the medical data from one site and drop it straight in to another site because of the policy constraints on that data,” said Eli Dart, a network engineer at the Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) who is a co-author of the paper. “But as members of a society, our health could benefit if the medical science community can become more productive in terms of accessing relevant data.”

Read the full story.

ESnet congratulates Barry Barish and Kip Thorne of Caltech and Rainer Weiss of MIT on receiving the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for their vision and leadership of the LIGO Laboratory. Their discovery of gravitational waves, made just two years ago, culminates decades of effort. ESnet is proud to have played a role in supporting this achievement.

LIGO’s Hanford facility in Washington was an early adopter of ESnet’s OSCARS, the On-Demand Secure Circuits and Advance Reservation System, for guaranteed bandwidth services in 2005 for early development. In fact, the project was one of the very first users of the OSCARS service.

Last year, ESnet upgraded the Hanford LIGO sites network connection to Seattle with a dedicated 10 Gbps link, which complemented a shared 10 Gbps link to Boise. The Hanford site consistently moves about 400 megabits of data per second to Caltech in Southern California.

You can see the real-time data transfer rates and other details of this connection on the MyESnet portal.

Lastly, we are also working with Caltech to improve end-to-end bandwidth at the campus as part of theascr-funded SENSE (SDN for End-to-end Networked Science at the Exascale) project. By improving scientific workflows and end-site driven intelligent services to increase data throughput, the project will help LIGO in using high throughput data transfer methods.

Again, congratulations to our LIGO colleagues and we look forward to continuing to support your research mission.

Read how Berkeley Lab’s distributed computing experts developed software to help the LIGO manage the distribution of data from the experiment.

For a great explanation of the LIGO project, read this NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory blog.