About Slate high performance storage for research computation at IU

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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.

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.

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. 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. Alternatively, log in to HPC everywhere and, in the "HPC Status" pane, look under "Storage". The quota command and HPC everywhere both display 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. HPC everywhere additionally displays your inode (file) quotas for these spaces.

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

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:

• Your legal responsibilities for protecting data containing protected health information (PHI) when using UITS Research Technologies systems and services
• About protected health information (PHI) data elements in the classifications of institutional data
• Secure research data containing HIPAA-regulated PHI on high performance file systems at IU