SNIC Storage resources

SNIC provides storage through storage projects.

The resources are provided through open procedures to support the best of breed in Swedish research and facilitate new research. The purpose of these allocations, granted by the Swedish National Allocations Committee (SNAC), is to provide large-scale data storage for live or working research data, also referred to as active.

  • Storage projects should not act as a backup service, and such requests for allocation will not be approved. Please, check with your university (home institution/organisation) IT department about backup services, strategies, and policies in place.
  • Storage projects should not be used for archival, long-term storage, or as a repository for static data. Once the data is no longer changing, data that should be retained, shared, or preserved should move to appropriate data services. The higher education institutions are responsible for archival and long-term preservation of research data produced by their researchers.

Available resources

Centre Storage

Centre storage, as defined by SNIC, is a storage solution that lives independently of the computational resources and can be accessed from all such resources at a centre. Key features include the ability to access the same filesystem in the same way on all computational resources at a centre and a unified structure and nomenclature for all centra. Unlike cluster storage which is tightly associated with a single cluster and thus has a limited lifetime, centre storage does not require the users to migrate their data when decommissioning clusters, not even when replacing the storage hardware itself.

Centre Storage typically include a high-performance parallel filesystem, e.g. Spectrum Scale or Lustre.

Swestore / dCache

Swestore can offload the Centre storage, its raison d'être, and while it is deployed and distributed across SNIC centres, you can benefit from the advantages of, among other things, locality and redundancy effects.

Access to data is protected using dual copies on two different geographical locations. There is block redundancy (RAID-6) on the individual storage servers. There is no backup of data stored in Swestore, except by special agreement.
The data is accessible via multiple access methods, like gridftp, webdav and NFSv4.1.

SSC Storage

The SNIC Science Cloud provides object storage based on an underlying CEPH solution.

LUMI Storage

Lumi has three tiers of storage. LUMI-F is Flash storage for high performance, LUMI-P consists of Lustre storage. LUMI-C is CEPH-based object storage. You do not apply for any particular type of storage but may combine them at your discretion, as long as you stay within your granted project allocation and do not exceed the quota for any of the storage types. If you can justify a quota increase during the project, it is obtainable by contacting the LUMI User Support Team, LUST.

When applying for LUMI storage, please consider usage fluctuations. If your peak usage is e.g. 1TB, it is unlikely that you are going to need 8 760 TB-hours in a year, which corresponds to 1TB on average throughout the year.

Additional resources

In addition to the resources above for project storage, SNIC also provides other types of storage. Home directories for your login and tape storage for backup and inexpensive storage of data less frequently used are examples of such storage resources. By agreement SNIC also makes available resources for a fee to select infrastructures, e.g. NGI and LHCK.

Last modified: 2022-12-20