Data
Frequently asked questions about data and data management.
How is my Data Secured on Scholar?
Scholar is operated in line with policies, standards, and best practices as described within Secure Purdue, and specific to RCAC Resources.
Security controls for Scholar are based on ones defined in NIST cybersecurity standards.
Scholar supports research at the L1 fundamental and L2 sensitive levels. Scholar is not approved for storing data at the L3 restricted (covered by HIPAA) or L4 Export Controlled (ITAR), or any Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI).
For resources designed to support research with heightened security requirements, please look for resources within the REED+ Ecosystem.
Link to section 'For additional information' of 'How is my Data Secured on Scholar?' For additional information
Log in with your Purdue Career Account.
Can I share data with outside collaborators?
Yes! Globus allows convenient sharing of data with outside collaborators. Data can be shared with collaborators' personal computers or directly with many other computing resources at other institutions. See the Globus documentation on how to share data:
Does Scholar have the same home directory as other clusters?
The Scholar home directory and its contents are exclusive to Scholar cluster front-end hosts and compute nodes. This home directory is not available on other RCAC machines but Scholar. There is no automatic copying or synchronization between home directories.
At your discretion you can manually copy all or parts of your main research computing home to Scholar using one of the suggested methods.
If you plan to use hsi or htar commands to access Fortress tape archive from Scholar, please see also the keytab generation question for a temporary workaround to a potential caveat, while a permanent mitigation is being developed.
HSI/HTAR: Unable to authenticate user with remote gateway (error 2 or 9)
There could be a variety of such errors, with wordings along the lines of
Could not initialize keytab on remote server.
result = -2, errno = 2rver connection
*** hpssex_OpenConnection: Unable to authenticate user with remote gateway at 128.211.138.40.1217result = -2, errno = 9
Unable to setup communication to HPSS...
ERROR (main) unable to open remote gateway server connection
HTAR: HTAR FAILED
and
*** hpssex_OpenConnection: Unable to authenticate user with remote gateway at 128.211.138.40.1217result = -11000, errno = 9
Unable to setup communication to HPSS...
*** HSI: error opening logging
Error - authentication/initialization failed
The root cause for these errors is an expired or non-existent keytab file (a special authentication token stored in your home directory). These keytabs are valid for 90 days and on most RCAC resources they are usually automatically checked and regenerated when you execute hsi or htar commands. However, if the keytab is invalid, or fails to generate, Fortress may be unable to authenticate you and you would see the above errors. This is especially common on those RCAC clusters that have their own dedicated home directories (such as Bell), or on standalone installations (such as if you downloaded and installed HSI and HTAR on your non-RCAC computer).
This is a temporary problem and a permanent system-wide solution is being developed. In the interim, the recommended workaround is to generate a new valid keytab file in your main research computing home directory, and then copy it to your home directory on Scholar. The fortresskey command is used to generate the keytab and can be executed on another cluster or a dedicated data management host data.rcac.purdue.edu:
$ ssh myusername@data.rcac.purdue.edu fortresskey
$ scp -pr myusername@data.rcac.purdue.edu:~/.private $HOME
With a valid keytab in place, you should then be able to use hsi and htar commands to access Fortress from Scholar. Note that only one keytab can be valid at any given time (i.e. if you regenerated it, you may have to copy the new keytab to all systems that you intend to use hsi or htar from if they do not share the main research computing home directory).
Can I access Fortress from Scholar?
Yes. While Fortress directories are not directly mounted on Scholar for performance and archival protection reasons, they can be accessed from Scholar front-ends and nodes using any of the recommended methods of HSI, HTAR or Globus.