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high-performance computing
place before a recent European Court of Justice ruling that places even more stringent controls over data to be exported from the EU, so it was not possible to explore the judgement’s implications for scientific and business use of the cloud.)
Can data protection be computerised? Te disarray of European national privacy laws was highlighted again towards the end of the meeting when Fabio Martinelli, of the Italian National Research Council discussed the Coco Cloud. Tis is a project funded by the European Commission to create ‘confidential and compliant clouds’ (hence Coco Cloud). Te researchers have had to go to extraordinary lengths to try to create a cloud whose operating soſtware would automatically enforce data usage policies that were acceptable to the different legal jurisdictions within Europe. Te idea behind the Coco Cloud project is
to allow European cloud users to share their data securely and privately in the cloud. From the point of view of the European Commission, this will increase the trust of users in the cloud services and thus encourage the more widespread adoption of cloud technologies,
LAWYERS MAKE A PROFIT OUT OF AMBIGUITY
Cars today are equipped with a huge range of sensors and car to car communication is generating vast amounts of data
growth of the Internet of Tings is pressing towards convergence of technologies, but obstacles remain, in that HPC and big data have evolved different hardware and soſtware systems while Open Stack, the open source cloud computing platform, does not work well with HPC. In a frank and outspoken criticism of poor
standards of data protection in the UK and Ireland, the meeting heard the head of IT operations at a major German bank warn that no German financial institution would trust a data centre or cloud service where its data might end up being transferred to
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the UK or Ireland. Te US Patriot Act, the disarray between European nations over data protection, and financial policies being pursued by some of the soſtware and service vendors, appear to be as important obstacles to the deployment of public cloud and big data technologies as any technical issues, judging by the themes emerging at the conference. Dr Jan Vitt, head of IT Operations at DZ
Bank, the fourth largest bank in Germany, told the meeting that Germany’s stringent data protection laws meant that if the bank wanted to go ‘off premise’ on a cloud application ‘we want to do so in Germany’. (Te meeting took
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with consequent benefits for the users and for Europe’ digital economy in general. Although various EU directives were supposed to have harmonised data protection across the European Union, Martinelli pointed out that ‘in Europe, we have to deal with 28 countries’ where integrating all the legislative constraints is difficult for soſtware engineers trying to write it into code for data usage control not least, he remarked, because there is a lot of ambiguity in natural language and ‘lawyers make a profit out of ambiguity’. Although the project is receiving public
funding from the European Commission, Martinelli pointed out that ‘We started with a real demand from big corporations across Europe to build a concrete framework for the creation, analysis and termination of data sharing agreements.’ Te pilot projects are working well, he continued, though ‘cooperation between lawyers and ICT experts has been challenging.’ As well as the actual Coco Cloud, the
project has also generated advice to the Commission which is now considering several documents on cross-border aspects of data protection. Moreover, HP wants to
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