About ACCORD¶
What is it?¶
ACCORD is a collaboration across the public universities of Virginia to build and share cyberinfrastructure for research on highly sensitive data. Made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation, ACCORD attempts to provide a service for institutions that may lack the financial, staffing, or technical resources to support such a platform. This project strives to be a repeatable model for other institutions across the United States.
ACCORD is project-based, which means that investigators request access to the platform, create a project and populate it with co-investigators, import data, and then create and use disposable computing environments to perform their computational research.
Who can use it?¶
This platform is open for approved academic research on highly sensitive data. Researchers from institutions of higher education across the Commonwealth of Virginia are invited to request access.
ACCORD can meet HIPAA, FERPA, and other less-restrictive data sensitivity requirements. More restrictive levels, such as CUI, FISMA, PCI cannot be satisfied.
How do I use it?¶
ACCORD is entirely web-based, which means that the primary software you need is a good, modern browser such as Chrome, Firefox, Edge or Safari. Once you have created a project, you will use the ACCORD Console to create an environment in which to do your work.
Most ACCORD environments are IDEs (Integrated Development Environment) or interactive code-data platforms in wide use.
ACCORD offers no SSH, Terminal, FTP, Remote Desktop, or VNC access.
Who runs it?¶
The ACCORD project was designed and built by the Research Computing Group at the University of Virginia, under the coordination of the ACCORD Grant Program Manager Tho Nguyen (faculty, Computer Science) and Ron Hutchins, Vice Provost for Information Technology.