Ethical Considerations of Doing Research at Scale

Research computing has taken on new life with the rise of user-friendly clusters, clouds, and grids. These range from infrastructure-as-a-service platforms like Amazon EC2, to campus-scale HTCondor pools, to national infrastructure machines like those found in XSEDE. I present the ethical considerations of doing research at scale by posing three questions from the perspective of a researcher: Who can see my data? Who can use my data? Who can take my data? These questions deal with data privacy and intellectual property concerns. I use the IEEE Code of Ethics and the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct as ethical guides in addressing these three questions as they pertain to developers of research tools such as workflow management systems. The purpose of asking these questions is two-fold: first to ensure that ethical issues are being discussed during software design, and second to start a conversation about rising concerns with data security and privacy on large-scale computing systems. I seek to address issues which users, system administrators, and software developers can work together to solve. I motivate the need for this conversation with a case study of scientific workflow applications which demonstrates potential pitfalls in the high performance computing ecosystem.