A variety of storage systems with varying characteristics make up the data platform available to the ITS-RC community. As datasets increase in size, complexity, and/or sensitivity, more attention is required to ensure best match of resources to the tasks at hand.

/proj

• High capacity storage
• OK to compute against, however as IO increases, /work becomes the better option
• OK to hold inactive data sets like a near-line archive
• If you have 30TB or more of truly inactive data, we can assist in moving it to Cloud based cold archive, achieving greater data durability and lower storage costs
• more info

/users
Your directory primary storage is: /users/{o}/{n}/{onyen}
This storage is provided by the same hardware as /proj

• High capacity storage
• OK to compute against, however as IO increases, consider copy/move to /work for processing
• OK to hold inactive data sets like a near-line archive
• If a meaningful amount of cold data accrues, it can be packaged and MOVED to cloud archive, providing more working space for your warm data
• /users is not intended to be used for team oriented shared storage, like /proj; it is intended to be your personal storage location; think of it as a capacity expansion to your home directory. Note that /work is NOT intended to be a personal storage location; /work is for data actively being processed, especially for workloads with high IO requirements.
• 10 TB quota

/work

• High performance storage
• New as of 2022
• Intended for active data only, aka hot data, actively being processed
• /work is NOT intended for holding inactive data
• Please MOVE inactive data to your /users directory
• more info

/ms

• High capacity
• Read-only at this time
• In process of migrating out of /ms
• All data in /ms must be re-homed
• more info

Cloud based cold data archive

• The most durable, least expensive storage option available, presuming there is low probability of needing to retrieve/access frequently or at large data volumes

---

The following two systems are built upon old hardware that is no longer on maintenance, and thus at non-trivial risk of loss as compared to the storage systems listed above. This is the prior generation of /proj hardware; high capacity, decent performance.

/overflow

Useful for:

• Data that can be re-acquired
• Intermediate results of analysis and workflows
• Staging area to re-organize data on its way somewhere else, such as Cloud based cold archive
• etc.

/datacommons

• Read only
• Suggestions for data sets to add are welcome
• Disposable data; if systems fail, data can be re-acquired

Examples of data sets in /datacommons:

• 1,000 Genomes
• Berkeley DeepDrive, bdd100k
• SCAMPS Dataset, Camera Measurement of Physiology
• Indoor Scene Recognition
• Stanford Dogs

---