ALCF/Archiving Data at ALCF

ALCF's High Performance Storage System (HPSS) system is a robotic tape drive system used for large amount of archival data storage that will not be often accessed. The system has two interfaces listed in ALCF documentation ([1]) that can be used, hsi and htar. In this wiki, the hsi interface will be focused on.

HSI Overview

HSI is a utility to interface with the HPSS system. It looks and operates much like the typical bash command lines that we are used to, but with some added complexities. When you enter hsi, the system will dump you into your "home" HPSS space at /home/username. hsi keeps track of both your location in this HPSS space and also your location in the "local" system that you are running hsi from. The hsi system will automatically set the "local" directory location to be the location that you entered the utility from.

Navigation through HPSS operates the same as a normal command line, with ls cd, and mkdir among others being valid commands for navigation through HPSS. If you need to navigate though the "local" directories though, this can still be done by appending an "l" to the front of these standard commands (i.e. lls lcd, and lmkdir). This can be useful if you entered hsi at the incorrect point or wish to archive data in multiple locations.

It should be noted that hsi does support tab-complete or up-arrowing for past commands. It is recommended that you enter the utility with a defined plan in order to reduce the amount of annoyance that the lack of these luxuries can cause.