NIH HPC News & Announcements
NIH HPC Object storage system available
Date: 11 January 2017 12:01:48
From: Tim Miller
The NIH HPC staff is pleased to announce the general availability of an
additional storage resource for Biowulf and Helix users: object storage.
What is object storage?
Object storage is a technology used by companies such as Amazon, Apple,
and Microsoft to store data for Web and cloud applications. The NIH HPC
object store is colocated with the HPC compute and disk storage systems
and can hold very large amounts of data that doesn't change frequently
(i.e. data that is written once and read many times - such as reference
genomics files). It is not intended to be used as an archive.
The object storage cannot be accessed the same way as disk-based storage
systems like your /home and /data directories. Instead, it is accessed via
a programming interface identical to that used by commercial cloud storage
(e.g. Amazon's S3). The HPC staff has developed command line utilities for
storing and retrieving data using this interface. We have also installed a
generally- available utility (RClone) for interacting with the object
storage, and other tools can be installed on user request. Users who are
comfortable doing so may also write their own programs or scripts to store
and retrieve data.
For more information on the NIH HPC object storage system, please see:
https://hpc.nih.gov/storage/object.html
To request space on the NIH HPC object store, please fill out the form at:
https://hpc.nih.gov/nih/object_request.html
Please note when filling out the form that you must justify why you are
specifically requesting object storage as opposed to an increased data
directory quota.
--
Tim Miller
NIH HPC systems staff
301-827-5261
https://hpc.nih.gov
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