The Center for High Performance Computing includes an object store as a low-cost option for archiving data. Although there is a fee for using the object store, the cost of the storage is heavily subsidized by the university, according to current plans. Each HPC user can request private space on the object store for personal use, for example to back up their home directory on Grace's cluster storage, or to hold research data sets when they are not being actively used. In addition, labs, departments, or other entities can request shared space that can be utilized by all of their users. The object store currently is implemented with a Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) appliance. The ECS system interchangeably supports both the S3 and Swift protocols for object access, as well as the NFS and HDFS protocols for file-system-like access to objects kept in the store. If you really insist, we also have a way to support SMB through a gateway node (good for Windows-based file shares). Although we haven't benchmarked it, we suspect that SMB access would be slower than other styles of access due to the extra hop through the SMB gateway node. The ECS system also supports the EMC ATMOS and CAS (from the EMC Centera world) protocols; however, the UAMS HPC management team is not actively supporting those protocols. Users who chose to utilize those protocols are on their own. Please consult the ECS Data Access Guide for details about the object access APIs supported by our object store. In most cases, the ECS Data Access Guide merely outlines the differences between the APIs as implemented in the ECS system and the reference APIs. Hence, a user may also need to consult the upstream API documentation to get more details about the protocols.
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There are a lot of other options for accessing the object store, including both free and paid software. We do not endorse any particular tool. An Object User can also set up a Bucket with File Access enabled at Bucket creation time. Then, using the ECS management GUI the Namespace Administrator for the Namespace in which the Bucket resides can set up, for example, an NFS share using that Bucket along with user ID mapping. Users can then mount and access the bucket using the NFS protocol. We have not benchmarked access to the object store via NFS, but suspect that it will be slower than access using the object protocols (e.g. S3 or Swift). If a user desires high speed NFS storage, UAMS IT offers at cost a research NAS that the researcher may use. Please contact UAMS IT directly if you would like Research NAS storage.
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