← DigiMed Secure Cloud

highlight ★
started 01.09.2020
location Leibniz Supercomputing Centre
result research
tech OpenStack, AMD-SEV/SNP, Nvidia H200, Quobyte

The goal of the DigiMed Bayern Project is to advance the digital transformation of Bavaria’s health system. With an initial focus on the secondary use of cardiovascular research data from university hospitals and research institutes, it integrates sensitive clinical, imaging, and multi-omic data to enable better, data-driven medicine. This approach supports more accurate prediction of disease risks, more targeted prevention, and improved diagnosis and treatment — starting with cardiovascular diseases but designed to be transferable to other conditions.

Under Work Package 6, which focuses on the storage and compute infrastructure, I contributed to the design and deployment of a secure, privacy-compliant cloud platform for integrating, sharing, and analyzing large-scale biomedical data. This included developing an architecture that replaces existing data silos, implements FAIR data principles, and supports AI-driven analytics. The infrastructure is built for scalability, interoperability, and long-term sustainability, providing a foundation for collaborative research and clinical translation.

Consortium website: digimed-bayern.de ➟
Cloud documentation: pages.gitlab.lrz.de ➟

Milestones

Mile Stone
09.2025 The DigiMed future user group is created.
07.2025 The DigiMed Secure Cloud becomes one of the 6 nodes of the German Human Genome-Phenome Archive.
03.2025 Onboarding of the German Human Genome-Phenome Archive and Genome Computing Centre.
12.2024 The DigiMed Bayern Project is extended for another 3 years and 2.7Mio€ are granted by the Bavarian Ministry of Health and Care.
11.2024 The DigiMed team of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre becomes its own group and becomes the trustworthy branch of the Big Data and AI group.
09.2024 Inspection of the infrastructure by the data protection officer — Bayerische Landesbeauftragte für den Datenschutz.
12.2023 The DigiMed Secure Cloud is announced to the public.
03.2022 The first secure data transfer from the German Heart Centre Munich to the DigiMed Secure Cloud takes place.
01.2022 The first CPU nodes with confidential computing are online.
11.2021 The first petabyte of storage is online.
(10.2018) (Kickstart of the DigiMed Bayern Project, 24Mio€ are granted by the Bavarian Ministry of Health and Care)

Contributions

Papers

  1. High-performance Computing Systems: Security Threats, Countermeasures and Prospects (in review), 2025.
  2. Comparative Overview of Medical Research Data Platforms: Interoperability, Privacy, and Federated Learning in Translational Biomedical Research (in review), 2025.
  3. N. Zhou, F. Dufour, V. Bode, P. Zinterhof, N. J. Hammer, and D. Kranzlmüller, “Towards Confidential Computing: A Secure Cloud Architecture for Big Data Analytics and AI,” in IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (IEEE CLOUD), (Chicago, Illinois, USA), 2023.

Talks

Posters

  1. F. Dufour, N. Zhou, V. Bode, P. Zinterhof, N. J. Hammer, D. Kranzlmüller, “Towards Confidential Computing: A Cloud Architecture for Big Data Analytics and AI in Biomedical Research”, in ISC, Hamburg, Germany, May 2023.
  2. N. Zhou, F. Dufour, V. Bode, P. Zinterhof, N. J. Hammer, D. Kranzlmüller, ” DigiMed Cloud: A Highly-Secure Cloud for Big Data Analytics and AI in Biomedical Research”, in Hipeac, Munich, Germany, Jan 2024.

Supervision and co-supervision

Press releases