Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2 Oct 2019

1. Personal Data Handling

VIKING’s handling of user personal data complies with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). For more information on personal data handling please contact the Data Protection Officer at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) by email dpo@sdu.dk or refer to the page Data protection at SDU.

VIKING does not disclose any personal data of the users to third-parties.

1.1 What personal data is collected by VIKING

Upon registration in VIKING (through the form at https://viking-suite.com/pages/user-registration or https://viking.sdu.dk/pages/user-registration), the following personal data is collected from the users :

In order to establish a link to a remote supercomputer (also referred to as “external resource” in this document), VIKING needs the user to provide credentials that are required for connecting to that resource. Each resource may require different credentials. Normally, such data includes:

The VIKING servers record information about your activity on the website. The logged data may include:

Such data may include personal Information (for instance, the IP address).

No further personal data except from listed above is gathered during the registration process or while using the VIKING service.

1.2 How is the personal data used

The email address is used for sending notifications to the user. For information about our policy regarding email notifications see section 4 below.

VIKING uses Gravatar service for displaying the user’s photo (or “avatar”) if it was uploaded to Gravatar by the user him- or herself. This photo is requested using a token derived from the user’s email address. The address itself cannot be restored from that token. We do not store or cache the photos themselves.

The name is used for communication with the person, for example when replying to user’s feedback, bug report etc. It is also displayed in the web interface of VIKING under the user’s account (and is visible only to that user). The name does not necessarily have to be the real name of the user.

The optionally provided affiliation, country and address are not displayed anywhere and are only collected for our filing and statistical purposes, as well as the logged data.

The usage of supercomputer credentials is described below in section 3.

1.3 Correctness of the personal data

VIKING is processing the data “as-is”, without modification, as provided by the user and only for the purposes described in section 1.2. The user can contact us for correcting this information at any time.

2. Computational data

VIKING runs computations using external software and supercomputer resources. This involves processing input data supplied by the user and producing the output data.

All data is available to the owning users through the VIKING interface.

2.1 Input and output data on external resources

VIKING may copy the input data to a user-specified location at an external resource if that resource is used for running the tasks. In this case, all copied input data, and the produced output data will reside on that resource’s filesystem. VIKING cannot ensure that the data will not be available for other users of the external resource, and it is the responsibility of the user to choose a location (folder) that is not available to others, relying on the security protocols of the resource.

2.2 Use of human personal data in computations

VIKING is not intended for performing computational tasks that involve processing human personal data.

If you know of a case when VIKING is used for a task that involves uploading and processing such data, please contact us.

3. Supercomputers usage policy

VIKING allows linking to external supercomputer resources in order to use their computational power. The user configures the VIKING interface to communicate with the supercomputer using the account data provided by the external resource to the user. Therefore, VIKING acts on behalf of the user of the external resource.

3.1 Supercomputer credentials

As mentioned in section 1.1, in order to establish connection to a supercomputer, the user provides the necessary information to VIKING. This data is stored securely, and it is only available to the owning user in the web interface. It is used by VIKING for communicating with an external resource when transferring data to and from the resource, and when running software.

3.2 Cryptographic keys

Apart from storing the provided supercomputer credentials, VIKING generates cryptographic RSA keys that are also used for communication with remote resources. An RSA key consists of a private and a public part. The private part is never revealed in the interface (even to the owning user), and the public part is visible to the owning user.

4. Email notifications

VIKING is using email addresses provided by the user (see sections 1.1 and 1.2) to send notifications regarding the following topics:

The emails are sent only if the user configured email notifications in the interface. By default VIKING is configured to not send any messages.

Regardless of the configuration, VIKING does not send emails containing:

The users are always welcome to contact us in case they are in doubt if an e-mail is from VIKING or from another source.

5. Cookies

VIKING uses cookies on the websites https://viking-suite.com and https://viking.sdu.dk. Our Cookies Policy explains what cookies are, how we use them, your choices regarding cookies and further information about them.

5.1 What are cookies

Cookies are small pieces of text sent by your web browser by a website you visit. A cookie file is stored in your web browser and allows VIKING to recognize you and make your next visit easier and VIKING more useful to you.

5.2 How VIKING uses cookies

When you use and access VIKING, we may place a number of cookies files in your web browser. We only use cookies to enable certain functions, such as authenticating users and preventing fraudulent use of user accounts.

No personal information is stored in the cookies.
No information is shared with third-parties.

5.3 What are your choices regarding cookies

If you'd like to delete cookies or instruct your web browser to delete or refuse cookies, please visit the help pages of your web browser.

Please note, however, that if you delete cookies or refuse to accept them, you will not be able to use VIKING, as it will be not possible to log in to VIKING.