Michael Commer

Peter Heger, Lech Nieroda, Roland Pabel et al.

Traditionally, the architecture of high-performance computing (HPC) systems is tailored for speed, while highly secure computer systems must sacrifice speed for security. However, a wide range of scientific domains, such as the life sciences, call for a combination of performance and security to allow processing sensitive data at scale. Here, we present RAMSES (Research Accelerator for Modeling and Simulation with Enhanced Security), an HPC system designed from the ground up to deliver high performance within a robust security framework. RAMSES integrates hardware-based memory encryption of AMD processors with state-of-the-art file encryption from IBM Storage Scale and the Thales CipherTrust manager, establishing an HPC platform that ensures continuous encryption throughout the data life cycle - at rest, in transit, and in use - in compliance with major data protection standards (European General Data Protection Regulation, ISO/IEC 27001 certification, and Federal Information Processing Standards). In addition, we implemented advanced operating system hardening, a multi-layered security architecture, and mandatory multi-factor authentication to adapt the HPC environment to increased security demands. Benchmark results from the biomedical sector demonstrate that the performance impact of the secure environment is limited and that integration of the conflicting requirements speed and security can be achieved while preserving a coherent, flexible, and user-friendly system.

Shihang Feng, Peng Jin, Xitong Zhang et al.

Multi-physical inversion plays a critical role in geophysics. It has been widely used to infer various physical properties~(such as velocity and conductivity). Among those inversion problems, some are explicitly governed by partial differential equations~(PDEs), while others are not. Without explicit governing equations, conventional multi-physical inversion techniques will not be feasible and data-driven inversion requires expensive full labels. To overcome this issue, we develop a new data-driven multi-physics inversion technique with extremely weak supervision. Our key finding is that the pseudo labels can be constructed by learning the local relationship among geophysical properties at very sparse well-logging locations. We explore a multi-physics inversion problem from two distinct measurements~(seismic and EM data) to three geophysical properties~(velocity, conductivity, and CO$_2$ saturation). Our results show that we are able to invert for properties without explicit governing equations. Moreover, the label data on three geophysical properties can be significantly reduced by 50 times~(from 100 down to only 2 locations).