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Stanford Research Computing Center

Welcome to Carina!

Carina is Stanford's private cloud research compute environment for high-risk data. 

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What is Carina?

Carina, named after the Carina Nebula, is a shared Big Data Computing Platform specifically designed for High Risk Data. Carina is a collaboration between the School of Medicine (SOM) and Stanford Research Computing.

This computing environment leverages a modern private cloud environment (Carina On-Prem) to address the significant demand for a secured computational environment to work with PHI and other high-risk data at scale. Carina is integrated with University regulations such as the Data Risk Assessment and is compliant with Stanford’s minimum security requirements for hosting High Risk Data.

Carina is available to any team led by a researcher with Principal Investigator privileges at Stanford (e.g.: faculty, or researchers with a PI waiver) working exclusively with high-risk data.

Carina On-Prem and Nero GCP

Stanford Research Computing also offers Nero GCP, a secure platform for research using high-risk data that runs on the Google Cloud Platform.

Our team's mission is to decrease time to science so that Stanford researchers can focus on their ideas and analyses without having to worry about their compute environment. 

We provide scalable yet compliant compute environments that meet the different needs of each research project. Stanford Research Computing staff are available to help researchers decide on the best environment for their work.

Connecting to the full-tunnel Stanford VPN

Because Carina is a compute platform for high-risk data, our clients are required to connect to the full-tunnel Stanford VPN. Making sure you connect appropriately can avoid unnecessary permission and access errors down the road. Please make sure to check our instructions for connecting to the VPN as you get started with Carina!