About

The Knowledge Discovery Infrastructure (KDI) is a secure enclave located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The concept for KDI began in 2009, born from a need to securely support government programs. After receiving a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) attestation, KDI worked to support the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to consolidate their data to better enable sharing across multiple programs that abided by a variety of policies, privacy issues, legacy technologies, contract complexities, and funding restraints.   There was an urgent need to provide access to “all the data-all the time” to help the more than 160,000 employees and contractors access information to better perform their jobs. The partnering was a success, with KDI helping CMS identify over $5 million in fraud and waste.  

Since then, the KDI platform has grown to now a 6-tenant enclave with 50 distinct research projects supporting protected data research on multiple projects.  The life changing research supported by KDI includes issues surrounding suicide prevention, cancer, cardiovascular disease, opioid addiction, childhood health, COVID-19, and predictive biology. 

The KDI enclave contains one of the largest health and biophysical databases in the world in support of a variety of medical research. It also offers ‘cloud-like’ operations, big data management, and high-performance computing. The KDI platform compliance meets all relevant national data protection standards including HIPAA, FISMA, HITECH, and NIST SP800-66. 

The KDI enclave’s capabilities have evolved to accommodate a broader range of moderate-level data research projects. From biometrics and artificial intelligence security research to imagery analysis, the platform provides a secure and compliant environment for researchers and external collaborators to explore groundbreaking innovations without compromising data privacy. 

KDI also works closely with ORNL’s scalable protected infrastructure. With proper Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) approval for project allocation, the KDI platform hosts a secure private network between KDI and the National Center for Computation Sciences at ORNL, providing researchers the ability to run computing jobs of their protected data on OLCF systems (Andes and Frontier). 

>>View KDI Service Catalog for services offered.

>>Contact KDI  for consultation on your sensitive data research projects.