Davide Murrau

I design and manage the digital infrastructures supporting biomedical and genetic research at IRGB-CNR. My daily tasks spans across Linux system administration, HPC cluster management, storage, networking, identity management and security, with a constant focus on keeping systems reliable and functional for the people who actually depend on them.

At the core of my infrastructure work is an HPC cluster of 7 nodes, used daily by around 30 researchers, PhD students, and research fellows for genomic and computational workloads. Keeping that environment stable, secure, and accessible, without becoming a bottleneck for science, is what drives most of my technical decisions.

My interest in cybersecurity goes back to my degree thesis, “Hardening dei Sistemi Informatici in Istituto di Ricerca: Enforcement della Sicurezza nell’HPC”, where I studied how to apply security hardening in a research context without sacrificing the openness required by scientific collaboration. That work shaped how I think about infrastructure: security and usability are not opposites but need to be designed together. It also pointed me toward Zero Trust architectures and the Medical Science DMZ model, approaches built specifically for environments that handle sensitive data while remaining collaborative by nature.

Beyond the HPC environment, I designed and maintain the institute’s identity and access management infrastructure, network segmentation, centralized authentication, monitoring, and log management. I also contributed to building the institutional intranet on SharePoint and work on automating operational processes through Microsoft 365 tools, small things that reduce friction for researchers and staff.

My broader goal is straightforward: research infrastructure should be something people trust and forget about, because it just works.