Data Portal

Owned by
Dylan Perkins
Last updated: May 31, 2024
2 min read

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.

This space is NOT backed up by ARCC

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.

If you are working with a collaborator external to uwyo, please contact ARCC to discuss access options.

  • 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

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: