Data handling and storage policy
Warning
User areas and project areas are private
You can share files with other project members using project areas.
All data accessed, stored, communicated, or transferred on any national HPC system (Betzy, Fram and Saga) or the National e-Infrastructure for Research Data (NIRD), must be handled in compliance to legal and regulatory requirements.
In addition, all data has to be directly related to the work effectuated and/or the research project(s) the user is participating.
User areas
User’s private data (such as keys, sessions, e-mails, etc.) may reside in their
home directory ($HOME
).
$HOME
is not a shared area and all data stored there has to be treated as
being private, regardless of its content.
To limit access to $HOME
only to the user and designated system administrators,
the directory permissions are set to 0700 (meaning: only the user can read, write, and execute).
Permissions are regularly controlled, and in case of mismatch, reset.
On the HPC clusters, users also have a user work area,
/cluster/work/users/$USER
($USERWORK
). It is possible to grant other users access here, f.ex
for debugging purposes, but you may not grant write access to others. Be mindful of the permissions
you set here, as you may inadvertently allow others to delete or modify your files.
Project areas
Project data is private to the project and shared between the project members. The project leader (PL) has sole discretion over project members, thus access to the project area(s).
Project local to a particular HPC system has its own directory, created with permissions set to 2770 (meaning that only the group can read, write, and execute).
Group ownership is regularly controlled for each project directory and reset in case needed to the group ID. This is required for storage accounting purposes.
Decommissioning
Starting at the 2020.1 resource allocation period, storage decommissioning procedures have been established for both HPC and NIRD project storages, to make storage more predictable for the projects and the provisioning more sustainable to Sigma2. For more details, please visit the data decommissioning policies page.