September 17, 2019
Beocat system administrator selected as XSEDE 2019-2020 Campus Champions Fellow
Kyle Hutson, system administrator for the K-State Beocat supercomputer, is one of five members of the more than 600 member Campus Champion community selected as Campus Champions Fellows for the 2019-2020 academic year. He will have the opportunity to work side by side with XSEDE staff and research teams to solve real-world science and engineering projects.
Hutson will be working with Alex Withers, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, on his project "Documenting NIST 800-171 for working with Classified Uncontrolled Information." One of the challenges Kansas State University is beginning to face is the requirement from funding agencies to implement controls related to controlled unclassified information, or CUI, in accordance with NIST 800-171. This document specifies 110 controls that must be in place to receive data from the funding agency. While many of these controls are costly and an inconvenience to an individual researcher with a small amount of CUI data, when moving to HPC, these costs can easily skyrocket to the point of infeasibility. Parts of the CUI framework are administrative and parts are technical.
Hutson plans to implement easy-to-follow solutions on the technical parts and advise on the non-technical parts, all in a recipe-style format which can be easily implemented, addressing gaps between what can be automated and what must be specific to every site's documentation in order to minimize the time a site must spend investigating and resolving these issues.
For more information on Beocat, contact Daniel Andresen, dan@k-state.edu, or visit beocat.ksu.edu/. Portions of this text used with permission of the XSEDE external relations team.