The Storage Workshop

On May 16, 2025, Peter Childs, Daniel Howard and Julita Inca ran a storage workshop at QMUL. The purpose was to educate QMUL researchers in storing and securing access to their data which is a critical part of their daily research. We outlined the methods available to achieve this.

As it was planned on Eventbrite, we had around 16 people mixed with in-person and online. We gathered in the Room 1.20 and 1.21 on the Dept W building.

We covered the use of data storage at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) in general and its use in High Performance Computing (HPC). To use data storage and backups in the Apocrita cluster, we encouraged our users to use the terminal Command Line Interface (CLI) to complete the activities we prepared in this regard. Our audience was engaged with the use of Linux commands.

All of them were able to understand and complete the tasks developed in the workshop, starting by the listing of files to be displayed to the use of Globus to do snapshots in Apocrita. The remote copy exercise was quite challenge due to the lack of familiarity with sensitive keyboard and spaces that should strictly be respected in Linux. Here, you may see the slides of this workshop. After the event, some of our users applied the backups and restore practices in their research and we received again great feedback.