Overview

ARCC’s primary research data storage service for University of Wyoming researchers and their collaborators is aptly named the ‘ARCC Data Portal’. The ARCC Data Portal serves the dual purpose of both providing the high performance back-end storage for the MedicineBow HPC system as well as the data storage solution for researchers needing a centralized data repository for ongoing research projects.

MedicineBow vs Alcova Spaces

To achieve these two purposes the Data Portal is organized into two separate spaces under the main directory cluster named medbow (for MedicineBow) and alcova for storage only projects. Each are detailed below.

MedicineBow

The medbow space can be thought of as the root level directory of the HPC system, that is separated into home, project, and gscratch directories. These spaces can only be used by researchers who have an ARCC account with membership to a PI’s project. This space is intended to used within HPC workflows where speed and minimal overhead are prioritized over backups.

• 20 days worth of snapshots will help recover from recent accidental data loss

• gscratch is subject to the purge policy

• Please see our policy page related to Cost of Resources for project space increases

More details are outlined in the documentation for MedicineBow.

Alcova

The alcova space is intended to be a collaborative data storage space using the SMB protocol for interactive access. This space is backed up by ARCC. This space can only be used by researchers with a uwyo.edu account that a project PI has requested access for.

• Daily backups

• 20 days worth of snapshots will help recover from recent accidental data loss

Since ARCC does take these precautions, there is a cost for this service beyond the default quota detailed below:

Cost

• FREE up to default allocation quota.

• Please see our policy page related to Cost of Resources for project spaces

How to Request a Storage only project on Alcova:

A PI may request an alcova project by filling out the Request New Project form and selecting ‘Data Storage’ in the requested resources section and listing alcova in the ‘If known, resources' section.

Accessing your project(s) on the Data Portal

For instructions on connecting to the ARCC Data Portal, please see the following pages:

• Connecting to the ARCC Data Portal from my computer

• Connecting to the ARCC Data Portal with Open OnDemand

Globus

The Globus endpoint name for the Data Portal is Medicine Bow. Then under the /cluster/alcova pathway.

For more information about using Globus, please refer to: Globus for Data Transfer

Access from Medicinebow

The Data Portal is accessible from the MedicineBow compute cluster. You can access is by changing directories to /cluster/alcova.

MedicineBow documentation can be found on the MedicineBow page.