Research Projects Storage Space Policy

The HPC cluster has two storage types: Active Storage and Archival Storage.

• Active Storage is the storage regularly used on the HPC cluster. This storage is used to continually access currently active computational research projects.

   

• Archival Storage is used to store data that is not used regularly on the cluster. It can be used for archiving research projects that may no longer be active, or data that is seldom used or needs to be kept for the record.

Faculty and Principal Investigators (PIs) can request active complimentary storage space on the High-Performance Computing cluster (HPC) according to their research-related computational needs (up to 35TB summed). PIs also have a file quota for up to 215,000 files per TB. PIs are also welcome to purchase additional storage. Please note that there can only be one PI as an owner of a directory on the HPC cluster.

Price: Additional Active Storage on the HPC cluster is priced at $300/TB/year. The storage space is granted in increments of 10TB.

RC provides two types of Archival Storage: Disk and Tape. Both technologies are made available to participants as Globus Collections. Archival Storage is not encrypted at rest.

For Disk, all files should be at least 4MB in size (block size in Ceph). For Tape, all files should be at least 100MB in size (this is due to the requirements of the tape system backing the GPFS filesystem). We recommend users tar/compress directories to meet these requirements.

Price: The price for Disk is $80/TB/year, and for Tape is $15/TB/year. There is no complimentary tier for Archival Storage options. Archival Storage is granted in increments of 10TB.

New Storage:

PIs can request new storage by clicking on the following link for the ServiceNow form:

New Storage Space Request

The form requests for information on whether a PI already has access to the cluster, name of the project space (lower case names and numbers with underscores are preferred), Name of the owner of the storage space, whether the usage is for Active or Archival Storage, the operating system being used to access the cluster, as well as the initial storage capacity required to start the storage space.

Once a PI submits a form, a ticket gets generated (that appears at the next page when the form is submitted, as well as accessible from the My Tickets tab in the upper banner). PIs are requested to update the associated ServiceNow ticket with the following information:

–  If there is a Data Usage Agreement (DUA) or Institutional Review Board (IRB) numbers attached to the storage request.

– If the request is for paid storage, and if so, the payment information.

– In case of Archival Storage, whether the request is for Disk or Tape.

Storage Extension: 

PIs can request changes to the storage space already allocated to them using the following ServiceNow form:

Storage Space Extension Request

The information required for Storage space extension is similar to what is discussed above for New Storage Space, and PIs are welcome to share this information in the associated ticket generated by the SeviceNow form. Please also make sure to request additional storage in increments of 10TB.

• Are the payments every month or on a yearly basis?

Payments for storage are renewed on a fiscal year basis (July 1 to June 30). Initially, requests can be prorated on a monthly basis. 

• If my project ends before the end of the fiscal year (e.g., November), do I get a refund for the remaining months?

No. Payments are for a full year and are non-refundable.

• I am unclear about how much active storage I need for my research project. Can we increase/decrease the storage requirement as the project progresses?

We recommend suggesting an estimated number for your storage requirements. Storage allocations can always be increased. However, paid storage cannot be decreased once it has been increased until the start of the next fiscal year (July 1st). You can also schedule a consultation with the RC team to discuss your storage needs.

• Is the free storage quota for every /work/work-foo directory or for each PI?

The storage quota is for each PI, and the storage allocation is calculated by adding up the storage allocation for each /work/work-foo directory under a PI. This is also true for the file quota.