Air‑Gapped HPC for National Research Sovereignty

Confidential client — Research & Defense

Executive Summary

We designed and deployed a sovereign, air‑gapped HPC platform with an offline control plane and local key custody. The program eliminated external operational dependencies, preserved research windows from forced vendor updates, and enabled classified simulations to proceed continuously under strict governance.

Challenge

Rising data‑nationalism and export controls require isolation from public cloud and foreign SaaS.
Vendor kill‑switch risk and forced updates threatened scheduled simulation windows and SLAs.
Scale‑out had to be deterministic, with minimal retraining of researchers and operators.

Sovereign Architecture Solution

Immutable node images with signed, offline updates; sovereign IAM backed by hardware tokens and least‑privilege RBAC.
Out‑of‑band admin network, bastion‑gapped access, and zero third‑party webhooks in the control plane.
Train‑the‑Trainer program and Testing‑on‑the‑Toilet micro‑tests to institutionalize reliability.

Results

Zero unscheduled downtime across seasonal runs (18 months observed).
100% local custody of signing and encryption keys; zero vendor API surface.
Modular node expansion executed in hours without retraining or toolchain disruption.