Figure 1: The SAIL Secure Research Platform.

SAIL operates on a secure research platform (UK SeRP). Beginning at the left of the diagram, wherever researchers are based, they access data through a provisioned, secure, research ready desktop using VMware Horizon infrastructure. The connection from the user’s terminal to the desktop is strongly encrypted and access control prevents data being transferred outside the desktop environment. The end user is authenticated through both user credentials and two factor authentication tokens. Provisioned desktops come in a variety of capacities and configurations to suit the type of analysis that the end user and project needs. As part of the research environment there are shared project spaces to enable collaboration through database space, file store, wiki, Git (source control) as well as access to wider support and help materials.

UK SeRP has many shared infrastructure components that can help deliver the programme’s objectives or specific project needs. SAIL uses IBM DB2 as its data warehouse due to the massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture and the ability to scale to suit the needs of such a large repository and the big data needs that this drives. To support specific project needs, other UK SeRP components can be made available, such as the HPC cluster or Kubernetes cluster to support processing pipelines, or GPU and AI cluster for training computing models. Through the provision of virtual machines or container environment, SAIL can support more complex methodological developments that require bespoke infrastructure to support development or deployment of tailored solutions. Business intelligence tools such as Tableau, R Shiny and PowerBI (not shown) are also available.

Two other UK SeRP instances (Data Science Building projects (DSB) and Dementias Platform UK (DPUK)) are included on the diagram to help illustrate the customisability of the platform, since these will operate using different components, or other governance regimens to SAIL.