Project Specific Filesystems

Purchasing Storage

Additional project and lab storage can be purchased on ORCD shared clusters by individual PI groups. This storage is mounted on the cluster and access to the storage is managed by the group through MIT Web Moira (see below for details).

The current options for storage are:

Storage Type	Description	Encryption at Rest	Backup	Namespace	Notes
Compute	Very frequent data access	Optional	No	Limited	Very fast access, special needs, high IO
Data	Frequent data access	Optional	No	Limited	Day to day research storage, active projects, instrument data buffers, etc.
Archival	Infrequent data access	Yes	No	Nearly Unlimited	Infrequently accessed data, unlimited namespace

Please note that all types of storage are not backed up by default.

Storage is charged at the start of each fiscal year. The first year is prorated by the number of months left in the current fiscal year. A purchase must be a minimum of 20 TiB and in increments of 20 TiB.

If you anticipate needing more than a few 100 TiB let us know when you request your storage. We may suggest purchasing a dedicated server for your lab.

For more information, including pricing, and to purchase storage please send an email to orcd-help@mit.edu. If you are purchasing storage please include the following in your request:

• The storage type (compute, data, or archival)
• Amount in TiB (20 TiB increments)
• Cost object
• The lab PI

Managing access using MIT Web Moira

Individual group storage is configured so that access is limited to a set of accounts belonging to a web moira list that is defined for the group store. The owner and administrators of group storage can manage access themselves, by modifying the membership of an associated moira list under https://groups.mit.edu/webmoira/list/[list_name]. The name of the list corresponds to the UNIX group name associated with the ORCD shared cluster storage.

Moira Web Interface Example

The figure below shows a screenshot of the web moira management page at https://groups.mit.edu/webmoira/list/cnh_research_computing for a hypothetical storage group named cnh_research_computing. The interface provides a self-service mechanism for controlling access to any storage belonging to this group. MIT account IDs can be added and removed as needed from this list by the storage access administrators.