← DigiMed Secure Cloud

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

DigiMed Bayern: The goal of the project is to advance the digital transformation of Bavaria's health system. The project focuses on the secondary use of cardiovascular research data from university hospitals and research institutes across the territory.1

Work Package 6: I contributed to the design, deployment, and operation of the DigiMed Secure Cloud2, a confidential cloud platform that allows the integration, sharing, and processing of large-scale sensitive data. This included developing an architecture that can replace existing on-premises data silos and migrate medical pipelines to cloud native technologies while implementing pseudonymization, FAIR data principles, and compliance with data protection and privacy regulations.3

DigiMed Secure Cloud: Concretly, the platform now hosts the German Heart Centre Datawarehouse4, the Bavarian Genome Computing Centre5, the Bavarian node for the German Human Genome-Phenome Archive6, the VRONI full genome sequencing database7, and the HerzFit mobile app anonymous data donation backend.8 It provides secure datasharing on the Munich scientific network and routine multi-omics tools and AI workbench for secure training and inference of medical models.

1 DigiMed Bayern ➟
2 DigiMed Bayern: IT Conception and Infrastructure ➟
3 DigiMed Secure Cloud documentation ➟
4 Deutschen Herzzentrum München ➟
5 Germany’s national genomDE strategy ➟
6 German Human Genome-Phenome Archive project ➟
7 VRONI study ➟
8 HerzFit mobile app backend ➟

Milestones

Mile Stone
11.2025 Nvidia H200 GPUs are online.
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 at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre becomes an independent group and forms 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. Fully Anonymized Data Acquisition for Digital Health Research in a Public-Private Partnership : A Case Study Using the HerzFit App (in review), 2025.
  2. High-performance Computing Systems: Security Threats, Countermeasures and Prospects (in review), 2025.
  3. Comparative Overview of Medical Research Data Platforms: Interoperability, Privacy, and Federated Learning in Translational Biomedical Research (in review), 2025.
  4. 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