Building a secure and compliant HPC environment on AWS following NIST SP 800-223

This article provides a comprehensive guide to building a secure and compliant High Performance Computing (HPC) environment on AWS following NIST SP 800-223 guidelines. The key points include:

• A zone-based reference architecture dividing HPC systems into four functional zones:
  • Access zone
  • Management zone
  • High performance computing zone
  • Data storage zone
• Leveraging AWS shared responsibility model for security
• Implementing security measures for each zone:
  • Access zone: VPC isolation, AWS WAF, Secrets Manager, IAM
  • Management zone: IAM, AWS Config, CloudTrail, Systems Manager
  • Computing zone: Nitro Enclaves, CloudWatch, Batch/ParallelCluster
  • Storage zone: EFS, FSx, S3, KMS encryption
• Provides CloudFormation templates for:
  • Network configuration
  • Security groups
  • Storage infrastructure
  • Slurm database
  • Active Directory
  • ParallelCluster deployment

The solution aims to create a secure, scalable HPC environment that balances performance and security requirements.