Sandbox for CSIRO and other staff to collaborate together to find current, best-practice solutions (or just better-practice) for data managment between CSIRO and NCI systems.
Teams across CSIRO are heavy users of NCI national computing resources. State-of-the-art modelling often generates enormous datasets, for example in the climate modelling efforts across the O&A BU. Everyday tasks like rsync between CSIRO and NCI systems for processing, safe archive, and importantly keeping limited NCI space quotas clear are becoming more onerous and can be both a roadblock for continued productivity on NCI as well as a major sink of person-hours.
Work with an informal working group (WG) to help build best / better practice to assist. Polish this practice before sharing more widely and engaging NCI staff.
- Define an initial use case
- generate better-practice approach to initial case
- implement and communicate results widely
- take on further specific use cases
Archive Decadal Climate Forecasting Project (DCFP) NCI Australasian Leadership Computing Grants (ALCG) raw netdcf to tape at CSIRO
The CSIRO DCFP is currently working under a recent NCI ALCG merit allocation - https://research.csiro.au/dfp/dcfp-awarded-key-computation-by-the-nci/ . Current storage limitations means that as the effort proceeds large collections of files will need to be archived constantly back to tape at CSIRO. If data-transfer is not fast enough work will stop at NCI due to lack of storage resources.
Our current need is to keep pace with 10TB per day - which would require approximately 120MB/s. Previous bbcp efforts by @hot007 reached 200MB/s.
The current task is to move 8 x 11TB collections of tarfiles where each 11TB collection is a directory with:
- 96 x 112GB tar files
- 1 x 40GB tar file
- two small directories with log files related to the parallel tarring process
112GB is close to the recommended 100GB files size for the CSIRO tape system and also the size of each model "member" keeping the essential structure of each model run.
See related issue for more detail
WG contributors add "issues" to https://github.com/Thomas-Moore-Creative/CSIRO-NCI-data-best-practice/issues with other specific use cases!
@dsroberts has some suggested improvements. See > #6 (comment)