Swestore-dCache

SNIC is building a storage infrastructure to complement the computational resources.

Many forms of automated measurements can produce large amounts of data. In scientific areas such as high energy physics (the Large Hadron Collider at CERN), climate modeling, bioinformatics, bioimaging etc., the demands for storage are increasing dramatically. To serve these and other user communities, SNIC has appointed a working group to design a storage strategy, taking into account the needs on many levels and creating a unified storage infrastructure, which is now being implemented.

National storage

The aim of the nationally accessible storage is to build a robust, flexible and expandable system that can be used in most cases where access to large scale storage is needed. To the user it should appear as a single large system, while it is desirable that some parts of the system are distributed across all SNIC centra to benefit from the advantages of, among other things, locality and cache effects. The system is intended as a versatile long-term storage system.

Swestore is collaboration with this groups ECDS, SND, Biomiage, BILS, UPPNEX,WLCG, NaturHistoriska RiksMuseet.

Before you apply for storage to Swestore, please check if our collaborators cover your research area, and first read their information about applying for SweStore storage.

• SweStore introduction
• Apply for storage or renew apply
• Per Project Monitoring of Swestore usage
• Getting and using certificates
• Accessing SweStore national storage with the ARC client
• Mounting SweStore national storage via WebDAV (Not recomendated at the moment)

Support: swestore-support

Example of storage project

Below are some examples of project that are using SweStore today.

Allocation name	Size in TB	Project full name
alice	400
uppnex	140	UPPmax NExt Generation Sequencing Cluster & Storage
brain_protein_atlas	10	Mouse brain protein atlas project
scims2lab	20	Identification of novel gene models by matching mass spectrometry data against 6-frame translations of the human genome
subatom		Low-energy nuclear theory and experiment
genomics-gu	10	Genomics Core Facility, Sahlgrenska academy at University of Gothenburg.
Chemo	5TB	Genetic interaction networks in human deseas
cesm1_holocene	30	Arctic sea ice in warm climates

Center storage

Centre storage, as defined by the SNIC storage group, is a storage solution that lives independently of the computational resources and can be accessed from all such resources at a centre. Key features include the ability to access the same filesystem the same way on all computational resources at a centre, and a unified structure and nomenclature for all centra. Unlike cluster storage which is tightly associated with a single cluster, and thus has a limited life-time, centre storage does not require the users to migrate their own data when clusters are decommissioned, not even when the storage hardware itself is being replaced.

Unified environment

To make the usage more transparent for SNIC users, a set of environment variables are available on all SNIC resources:

• SNIC_BACKUP – the user's primary directory at the centre
  (the part of the centre storage

that is backed up)

• SNIC_NOBACKUP – recommended directory for project storage without backup
  (also on

the centre storage)

• SNIC_TMP – recommended directory for best performance during a job
  (local disk on

nodes if applicable)