The Digital Research Alliance of Canada is a national governmental organization supporting advanced research computing (services formerly provided by Compute Canada). The Alliance provides researchers access to high performance computing. They also provide large amounts of storage for researchers.
Data is transferred to the Alliance ARC systems using secure methods. The systems are not specifically set up for handling sensitive data, but support staff can give some guidance.
Each group starts with 1 TB of project space, access to more storage is available through research competitions. 20 TB of temporary working space ('scratch') is available but is deleted every 60 days. Full information on storage available can be found on the Alliance ARC Storage page
No cost for users.
n/a
Home and project space is nightly backups which are retained for 30 days, while deleted files are retained for a further 60 days
Servers are all in Canada, where your data is stored will depend on which cluster you access.
Once the faculty PI has made a CCDB account, they can sponsor research staff and graduate student accounts. Accounts are not limited to McMaster affiliated individuals. Files and folders can be shared with non-group members using filesystem permissions in the system, and with non-users with the Globus file transfer system.
Any research needing computer processing power beyond that of a desktop computer can benefit from Alliance ARC resources.
Mark Hahn hahn@sharcnet.ca is locally based or visit the Alliance contact page
Faculty members at any Canadian University can make a CCDB account by following the instructions here. They can then sponsor research staff and graduate students to make accounts.
High
Globus is the preferred tool for transferring data to and between Alliance ARC systems. File storage can also be accessed via SFTP, SCP, or other network protocols.