ARCHIVE/PERM
The magnetic tape archive provides additional storage for inactive data for short-term archival and to free up space in the Project, HOME, and SCRATCH/WORK data stores. It is only accessible from the login nodes. Its capacity grows as more tapes are added. Its characteristics are
- Secure file system location on magnetic tapes
- Extremly high latency per IO operation, especially for reading data not in the HDD cache (minutes to open a file)
- Optimized for a small number of large files
- Short-term archival
- Has a quota
Tip
Members of the following institutions:
- Georg-August-University of Göttingen
- Universitätsmedizin Göttingen (UMG)
- Max-Planck Gesellschaft (MPG)
- Deutsches Primatenzentrum (DPZ)
- Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen (GWDG)
have access to the GWDG Archive (AHOME) under the Academic Cloud username associated with their institutional account. It is not accessible from the regular HPC compute or login nodes, but there are dedicated frontend nodes that can be used to transfer data between this location and the HPC filesystems. See Using non-HPC Storage from GWDG for more information.
For reasons of efficiency and performance, small files and/or complex directory structures should not be transferred to the archive directly. Please aggregate your data into compressed tarballs or other archive containers with a maximum size of 5.5 TiB before copying your data to the archive. For large data, a good target size is 1-2 TiB per file because such files will usually not be split across more than one tape.
The project ARCHIVE/PERM data stores for each kind of project are given in the table below.
The directory’s symlink in the Project Map directory for each project has the name dir.perm.
| Kind of Project | Path | Media | Capacity | Filesystem |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NHR | /perm/projects/PROJECT | tape with HDD cache | growable PiBs | Stornext exported via NFS |
The user ARCHIVE/PERM data stores for each kind of user are given in the table below.
| Kind of User | Path | Media | Capacity | Filesystem |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SCC (legacy only) | /usr/users/a/USER | tape with HDD cache | growable PiBs | Stornext exported via NFS |
| NHR (legacy only) | /perm/USER | tape with HDD cache | growable PiBs | Stornext exported via NFS |
Warning
ARCHIVE/PERM directories are only accessible on the login nodes, but each group of login nodes has access to only one of them. See Cluster Storage Map for more information.
Warning
The NHR ARCHIVE/PERM is a SHORT-TERM archive, NOT long-term archive. We can only guarantee data retention for the duration of a project and one year after its expiration, though we do try to retain data longer on a best-effort basis. Thus,
- It is not a solution for long-term data archiving.
- There is no guarantee for 10 years according to rules for good scientific practice.
See Data Retention Policy for more information.