Using nearline storage

Nearline is a filesystem virtualized onto tape

Nearline storage is a disk-tape hybrid systems with a layout like Project, except that the system may "virtualize" files by moving them to tape based on criteria like age and size, and then back again upon read or recall operations. This is a way to manage less-used files. On tape they do not consume your disk quota, but they can still be accessed, albeit more slowly.

This is useful because the capacity of our tape libraries is both large and expandable. When a file has been moved to tape (that is, "virtualized"), it will still appear in the directory listing. If the virtual file is read, the reading process will block for some time, probably a few minutes, while the file contents are read from tape to disk.

Expected use and status

Because of the delay in reading from tape, Nearline is not intended to be used by jobs, where the delay would waste allocated time. It is only accessible as a directory on certain nodes of the clusters, and in particular, not on the compute nodes

Nearline is intended for use with relatively large files - do not use it for large numbers of small files. In fact, files smaller than a certain threshold size may not be moved to tape at all. Files smaller than ~200MB should be combined into archive files ("tarballs") using tar or a similar tool.

HPSS is the name of the Nearline service at Niagara. At Graham the service is called "nearline". Work is underway at Cedar and Béluga, which will have implementations that resemble Graham's.

How to use

General purpose clustersNiagara

Nearline is only accessible as a directory on the login nodes and DTNs ("Data Transfer Nodes"),

To use Nearline, just put files into your ~/nearline/PROJECT directory. After a period of time (currently 24 hours), they'll be copied onto tape. If the file remains unchanged for another period (also 24h), the copy on disk will be removed, making the file virtualized on tape.

If you remove a file in ~/nearline, the tape copy will be retained for up to 60 days. To restore such a file, contact technical support with the full path for the file(s) and desired version (by date), just as you would for backup restoration. Note that since you will need the full path for the file, it is important for you to retain a copy of the complete directory structure of your Nearline space. For example, you can run the command ls -R > ~/nearline_contents.txt from the ~/nearline/PROJECT directory so that you have a copy of the location of all the files in your Nearline space.

There are three ways to access Nearline on Niagara:

1. By submitting hpss-specific commands htar or hsi as an 'archive' job to SLURM; see the HPSS documentation for detailed examples. Using job scripts offer the benefit of automating Nearline transfers, and is the best method if you use HPSS regularly.

2. For small data management of files in HPSS, you can use the VFS ("Virtual File System") node, which is accessed using the command: salloc --time=1:00:00 -pvfsshort

3. You can also use Globus for transfers to and from HPSS using the endpoint computecanada#hpss. This is useful for occasional usage and for transfers from other sites.

In usage modes 1 and 2, your HPSS files can be found in the $ARCHIVE directory, which is like '$PROJECT' but with '/project' replaced by '/archive'.