In the Tinker SANE environment, you can see, interact, and work with sensitive data without having the ability to copy the data out of the environment. The data provider checks and releases your output results. In this document, you will find the steps to work with Tinker SANE.

1. Prepare your workspace

You may want to combine the sensitive data with your own data, and/or use additional analysis software. Researchers cannot add these to SANE themselves, so should send these to the data provider outside SANE (e.g. via e-mail).

2. Log in to the Research Cloud portal

Once the data provider set up the SANE environments, they will invite you to the SANE Collaboration. Check your e-mail inbox and accept the invitation. Then go to the SURF Research Cloud portal and log in with the identity that the data provider invited you to the Collaboration. 

If this is your first time using Research Cloud you will likely need to set up your Time-based One Time Password

If you are working with Python and you wish to request a set of Python packages in your environment, please contact the data provider about this before moving on to step 3. The data provider can make them available when setting up the prerequisites of a SANE project.

3. Create a Tinker workspace

  1. (Optionally) Create a persistent volume *
  2. Click on "Create new workspace"
  3. Select the CO to which you were invited
  4. Select the catalog item "Tinker SANE" **
  5. Select a flavor for your virtual environment that is suitable for your application
  6. In the 'Options' step:
    1. Select the only Private network that is made available to you
    2. (Optionally) Select the storage created in step 1
  7. Finalise the wizard

* A persistent volume stores scripts and data separately from the workspace, ensuring they remain available after workspace recreation
** The Tinker Catalog item could be named differently depending on your Collaboration (e.g. Tinker SANE MyProject)

4. Access your Tinker workspace

Once your Tinker SANE workspace is running (can take about 15 minutes), open your Remote Desktop client (e.g. TigerVNC, Windows App, etc), and connect to the workspace manually using the information in the workspace details. You will need to provide the IP address to connect to the workspace. To log in use the username and password belonging to your Research Cloud account. For more information, please go to: Log in to your workspace

5. Perform analysis

Within the Tinker workspace that you access via the virtual desktop, you can freely work with the sensitive data that is made available to you.

6. Prepare output results

Place any output results in the folder "This PC\sane-data\results" . Ask the data provider outside of SANE (e.g. via e-mail) to review these results. The data provider will make the output results available outside of SANE. 


  • No labels