Acacia Object Storage.

  • /scratch and /software on Setonix do not provide permanent storage space for research data.

  • The data that needs to be stored longer than just a few weeks should be copied to the Acacia object storage service.

  • Acacia provides a platform that you can use to store your data as long as your Pawsey project is active.

  • There are two types of accounts available on Acacia, user and project.

  • Pawsey user accounts come with a 100GB allocation.

  • All active projects with Pawsey supercomputing, Nimbus research cloud, and Visualisation projects have an allocation of at least 1TB.

Acacia is built upon the open-source software Ceph. Instead of files, your data is stored as objects in buckets:

  • Buckets are the basic containers that hold your data.

  • Everything you store in Acacia must be contained in a bucket.

  • Unlike folders, you cannot nest buckets or put one bucket inside another.

  • Objects are the individual pieces of data contained in a bucket.

  • An object is typically a file and any metadata that describes the file.

  • Objects cannot be changed while in the storage system.

  • To change an object, you must first download, modify, and then upload it again.