UW-Madison has enrolled in the NIH Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability (STRIDES) program, which provides access to cloud computing resources for NIH-funded researchers. The STRIDES program provides support and incentives for NIH-funded investigators to make use of computing and data resources in the public cloud and is part of NIH’s Strategic Plan for Data Science. Benefits to researchers include training, access to consulting, and significant discounts on cloud services.
The University has enrolled with Google Cloud Platform and is at the beginning stages of pursuing a similar agreement with Amazon Web Services as a partner in the STRIDES program. If you are a UW-Madison Investigator with a current NIH-funded award, you are eligible to participate. To learn more and sign up for your STRIDES/GCP account, you will need to complete the UW Madison Cloud Account Request form, specify GCP as the platform, NIH and the specific grant as the funding source, and provide the name of your NIH Program Officer. NIH is also requiring that you notify your Program Officer to let them know you plan to use STRIDES resources with your grant funding.
In parallel with enrolling in the STRIDES program, the University has also completed work on secure cloud architectures and processes for working with restricted data, including Personal Health Information, on the GCP platform. This work was carried out as part of UW-Madison’s participation in the national RHEDCloud consortium, a group of US research universities that have pioneered developing and sharing processes for securing health and research data in the public cloud. An additional security risk assessment may be required depending on your project goals and the GCP services you plan to use.
To explore cloud infrastructure and learn more about how Google Cloud Platform might be right could be leveraged for your research data and computing workflows, you may want to attend Cloud office hours or meet with a cloud research cyberinfrastructure specialist. Contact us at rci@g-groups.wisc.edu.