About Slate high performance storage for research computation at IU

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Overview

Slate is a centralized, high performance Lustre file system designed for the persistent storage of scholarly data to meet the needs of data-intensive workflows and analytics running on Indiana University's research supercomputers. Space on Slate is not subject to a purge policy.

Data stored on Slate are not backed up in any way, shape, or form by Research Technologies or any other entity in UITS.

Important:

Before storing data on any of Indiana University's research computing or storage systems, make sure you understand the information in Types of sensitive institutional data appropriate for UITS Research Technologies services.

Make sure you do not include sensitive institutional data as part of a file's filename or pathname.

Create an account

Space on Slate is available to all IU research supercomputer users. To create a Slate account, follow the instructions in Get additional IU computing accounts.

When your account is created, your space on Slate will be mounted on the IU research supercomputers at (replace username with your IU username):

/N/slate/username

Quota allotment

The default quota allotment is 800 GB per user. Upon request, your quota may be increased to a maximum of 1.6 TB. To request more space on Slate, contact the UITS High Performance File Systems (HPFS) group using the Research Technologies contact form (from the "Choose an area to direct your question to" drop-down, select High performance storage). Additionally, an inode quota (sometimes called "file quota") limits the number of objects a single user can create to 6.4 million.

To check your quota, use the quota command from the command line of any IU research supercomputer. If the quota command is not already loaded by default, use the module load quota command to add it to your environment. The quota command displays disk (data) quotas and usage for your home directory space on the research supercomputers, your space on Slate, and your space on the Scholarly Data Archive (SDA), as applicable.

To check your inode usage (the number of items stored in your allotted space) on Slate, enter (replace username with your IU username):

lfs quota -h -u username /N/slate

To check the size of a file stored on Slate, enter (replace username with your IU username and filename with the name of your file):

ls -sh /N/slate/username/filename
Note:
  • Your quota is associated with your Unix UID. If you exceed your quota, any data transfers to Slate that you've initiated, or jobs belonging to you that write to Slate, will fail until you either get a quota increase or delete enough data to be below your present quota.
  • If you are granted a double allocation (1.6 TB) and do not exceed the 800 GB default allocation for six months, your account will revert to the default allocation. (You may request the double allocation again, if necessary.)
  • Researchers needing shared space or an allocation larger than 1.6 TB may request an account on Slate-Project.

Work with PHI

This UITS system or service meets certain requirements established in the HIPAA Security Rule thereby enabling its use for work involving data that contain protected health information (PHI). However, using this system or service does not fulfill your legal responsibilities for protecting the privacy and security of data that contain PHI. You may use this system or service for work involving data that contain PHI only if you institute additional administrative, physical, and technical safeguards that complement those UITS already has in place.

If you have questions about securing HIPAA-regulated research data at IU, email securemyresearch@iu.edu. SecureMyResearch provides self-service resources and one-on-one consulting to help IU researchers, faculty, and staff meet cybersecurity and compliance requirements for processing, storing, and sharing regulated and unregulated research data; for more, see About SecureMyResearch. To learn more about properly ensuring the safe handling of PHI on UITS systems, see the UITS IT Training video Securing HIPAA Workflows on UITS Systems. To learn about division of responsibilities for securing PHI, see Shared responsibility model for securing PHI on UITS systems.

Get help

Slate is managed by the UITS High Performance File Systems (HPFS) team. If you need help or have questions, contact HPFS using the Research Technologies contact form; from the "Choose an area to direct your question to" drop-down, select High performance storage.

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Last modified on 2024-01-25 09:52:24.