SDSC System Launches Secure Environment for NIH Controlled Access Data Research
Published June 02, 2026
New NIST SP 800-171 compliant capabilities on the Triton Shared Computing Cluster (TSCC) expand secure research computing support for NIH-funded projects.
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at University of California San Diego Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing has announced that the Triton Shared Computing Cluster (TSCC) now supports a NIST SP 800-171 compliant environment for handling National Institutes of Health (NIH) Controlled Access Data (CAD), including sensitive datasets such as dbGaP. As the research landscape increasingly needs compliant environments, UC San Diego’s campus research computing cluster TSCC provides shared professionally managed cyberinfrastructure to researchers.
“We are now able to ensure that researchers securely work with regulated biomedical and genomic datasets while meeting the federal cybersecurity and data protection requirements mandated for NIH-controlled research data,” said Subhashini Sivagnanam, SDSC’s Cyberinfrastructure Solutions and Services manager and program director for the TSCC system. “By providing a compliant environment within TSCC, SDSC is helping researchers streamline access to advanced computing resources without compromising security or compliance obligations.”
Accessing NIH Controlled Access Data (CAD) requires an institutional attestation confirming that the researcher’s computing environment meets NIST SP 800-171 requirements. Researchers interested in using NIH CAD on TSCC are encouraged to coordinate with their campus Office of Information Assurance (OIA) or Health Sciences IT organization to obtain the required attestation for submission to NIH.
“Achieving NIST SP 800-171 compliance required a rigorous review of our system security plan, controls and data handling practices across the entire TSCC environment,” said SDSC Chief Information Security Officer Winston Armstrong. “Working closely with the TSCC team and campus OIA, we were able to build a compliant infrastructure for researchers to work with NIH data that is required to meet the new CAD requirement.”
TSCC offers two access models: the hotel model for flexible, pay-as-you-go compute access, and the condo model, where principal investigators purchase dedicated nodes within the shared cluster. Both are centrally managed by the TSCC team and fully available within the compliant environment.
“The new secure computing capability reflects SDSC’s ongoing commitment to supporting the evolving needs of the research community by providing scalable, secure and compliant cyberinfrastructure for data-intensive science,” said SDSC Director Frank Würthwein.
Additional details about system requirements, responsibilities and access procedures are available on the TSCC NIST compliance information page.