About Slate high-performance storage for research computation at IU

On this page:

Overview
Create an account
Quota allotment
Work with PHI
Get help

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. Unlike the Data Capacitor II (DC2) file system, Slate is not subject to a purge policy. Total capacity of Slate is 3.4 PB, and the measured aggregate write performance is 64 GB/s.

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) team.

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

du -sh /N/slate/username/filename

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

ls -sh /N/slate/username/filename

To check your quota, make sure the quota module is loaded, and then enter quota. The quota command displays quotas and usage for your home directory space on the research supercomputers, your space on the high-performance file systems, and your SDA account (as applicable).

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.

For more, see:

Get help

For information about using the IU Globus Web App to move Data Capacitor II project data to Slate or Slate-Project, see Move DC2 project data to Slate or Slate-Project at IU.

Slate is managed by the UITS High Performance File Systems (HPFS) team. If you need help or have questions, contact the HPFS team.

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