Secure disposal of HPC?

[sawyl]

Historically, secure data erasure hasn't been a big problem for supercomputers. Either the systems have been used in academic environments with a relaxed approach to secure deletion of data; or they've been used in paranoid government agencies, where all storage hardware is routinely destroyed during decommissioning. But with the changing shape of the HPC market and the growth in data protection and due diligence legislation, this would no longer seem to be the case. Thus, I wonder how long it will be before vendors start to offer a boot-and-nuke facility as standard with their systems.

The way I see it, the destruction process should mirror an automatic install process:

1. The system bootstraps from an external server
2. The boot process creates the necessary file systems in memory
3. The post-boot processes detect any directly attached disc devices
4. The detected discs would then be automatically wiped in a secure way, e.g. using scrub
5. The system would then confirm its actions and shutdown

I can't imagine this as being particularly difficult to achieve on any of the machines I'm familiar with. Under Super-UX, for example, it might simply be a case of modifying the MINI install image to add a deletion utility and a set of scripts to kick it off.

I can understand why vendors might worry about including something as potentially dangerous as a secure deletion tool with their standard software bundle — no-one want to risk a support call from a customer who's just accidentally trashed their system beyond hope of recovery — but I'm sure there are customers out there who'd be interested in anything that made data confidentially less of a worry.