Examples for using Allas in CSC supercomputers
CSC supercomputers, Puhti and Mahti, do not provide permanent storage space for research data. The data that needs to be stored for a longer time than just few weeks, should be copied to Allas object storage service. Allas provides a platform that you can use to store your data as long as you CSC project is active. In addition to storing, Allas can be used for transporting data between different servers and sharing data with other users.
This tutorial provides four examples for using Allas in Puhti and Mahti. The examples are based on interactively executed commands and thus apply only for relatively small datasets (max some hundreds of GBs).
- The first example uses the a-commands (a-put, a-get) for uploading data from Mahti to Allas and then downloading the data to Puhti.
- The second example transports the same data using rclone.
- The third example focuses on uploading large files to Allas.
- The fourth example handles the case in which the dataset to be copied includes a large amount of files.
The a-commands are better suited for cases when the data is mainly used within the CSC computing environment (Puhti, Mahti). The second option, rclone, is good for cases when the data will be used outside CSC too.
Get access to Allas
By default, CSC computing projects do not have access to Allas. Thus, the first thing is to add the Allas service to your project. This is done in the MyCSC interface. Note that only the project manager can apply for access. Once access is granted, all project members must visit the MyCSC and accept the terms of use for Allas before they can use the Allas storage area.
The default storage quota in Allas is 10 TB. As this space is shared with all project members, it is
possible that the space is not sufficient. In that case, you should estimate how much space is needed
and request more space. The request should be sent to servicedesk@csc.fi.
Please include in your quota request:
- The ID/name of your project
- The amount of Allas space needed
- A short description of the data to be stored
Note that the data stored in Allas consume billing units of the project.
Example 1: Using Allas with a-commands
A. Uploading data from Mahti to Allas
The a-commands are Allas-specific tools that allow an easy start with Allas.
The a-commands pack,and move data automatically. You can also apply compression for your data before storage.
For e.g. text formatted data compression reduces the storage space needed but on
the other hand makes the storage process bit slower. The a-commands are a good option for miscellaneous data
that is mostly used in the CSC environment.
In this example, we have the sub directory genomes/zebrafish in the scratch directory of a project in Mahti (/scratch/project_2001659). The zebrafish directory contains eight files listed below:
ls genomes/zebrafish Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.1.bt2 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.2.bt2 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.3.bt2 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.4.bt2 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.rev.1.bt2 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.rev.2.bt2 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa.fai
To copy the content of this directory to Allas, I first set up the Allas environment:
module load allas
allas-conf. The command asks for users' CSC password (xxxxxxxxxxx) and
then lists the Allas projects that are accessible. In this case, we select project_2001659.
[kkayttaj@mahti-login11 ~]$ allas-conf Please enter CSC password for account kkayttaj: xxxxxxxxxx Checking projects available for your account. Please wait. 1) project_2000982 2) project_2001659 3) project_2000136 4) abort allas_conf Please choose a project by giving an item number from the list above: 2 allas connection configured successfully. Connection stays active for eight hours.
allas-conf opens a connection to the specified Allas project for eight hours. If you want to start using
another project, you need to run allas-conf again. However, in one shell session you can have only one Allas project active at a time.
Next I enter the zebrafish directory:
cd /scratch/project_2001659/genomes/zebrafish
a-put command:
a-put Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 files from Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa uploaded to bucket 2001659-mahti-SCRATCH in Allas as one file:
2001659-mahti-SCRATCH/genomes/zebrafish/Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Upload summary:
Date Name Files Size(kB) Location in allas
12.10.20 12:10:50 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa 1 1330852 2001659-mahti-SCRATCH/genomes/zebrafish
-----------------------------------------------------------------
OK
</pre>
Moving data to Allas file by file is slow and produces large amounts of objects. It is often more efficient to
upload data to Allas one directory at a time and store the data in bigger chunks. For example, to upload the
zebrafish directory, we first enter the _genomes_ directory
```text
cd /scratch/project_2001659/genomes/
a-put to upload the whole zebrafish directory to Allas as one object.
a-put zebrafish/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
8 files from zebrafish uploaded to bucket 2001659-mahti-SCRATCH in Allas as one tar file:
2001659-mahti-SCRATCH/genomes/zebrafish.tar
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Upload summary:
Date Name Files Size(kB) Location in allas
12.10.20 14:10:47 zebrafish 8 3191656 2001659-mahti-SCRATCH/genomes
-----------------------------------------------------------------
OK
After this, we have another object in the 2001659-mahti-SCRATCH bucket:
[kkayttaj@mahti-login11 genomes]$ a-list 2001659-mahti-SCRATCH 2001659-mahti-SCRATCH/genomes/zebrafish.tar 2001659-mahti-SCRATCH/genomes/zebrafish/Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa
Note that, in fact, the file Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa is now stored in Allas twice: As an individual object (genomes/zebrafish/Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa) and as part of the genomes/zebrafish.tar object.
B. Downloading to Puhti
Next we download the same data to Puhti. After connecting to puhti.csc.fi, I go to the scratch directory of the project 2001659 and load the allas module:
cd /scratch/project_2001659
module load allas
allas-conf command:
allas-conf project_2001659
mkdir kkayttaj
cd kkayttaj/
a-list,we can now see the objects that were just uploaded from Mahti to Allas:
[kkayttaj@puhti-login12 kkayttaj]$ a-list 2001659-mahti-SCRATCH [kkayttaj@puhti-login12 kkayttaj]$ a-list 2001659-mahti-SCRATCH 2001659-mahti-SCRATCH/genomes/zebrafish.tar 2001659-mahti-SCRATCH/genomes/zebrafish/Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa
Locating data is easy as there are only two objects in the bucket, but as more data is added to Allas,
locating a specific file among dozens of buckets containing hundreds of objects may be difficult.
In that case, you can search for a specific file with the command a-find. In this example, I can check if
an object contains the file Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa:
[kkayttaj@puhti-login12 kkayttaj]$ a-find -a Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa ---------------------------------------------- Checking bucket: 2001659-mahti-SCRATCH Object: 2001659-mahti-SCRATCH/genomes/zebrafish.tar includes 2 file names that that match query: Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa Object: 2001659-mahti-SCRATCH/genomes/zebrafish/Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa includes 1 file names that that match query: Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa ------------------------------------------------ Query: Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa Total of 3 hits were found in 2 objects -------------------------------------------------
The a-find report above tells that, for example, the object 2001659-mahti-SCRATCH/genomes/zebrafish.tar contains
two files whose names match Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa (the other file is Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa.fai). Note that a-find finds
matches only among objects that were uploaded with a-put.
Next we download the data to Puhti using the a-get command:
[kkayttaj@puhti-login12 kkayttaj]$ a-get 2001659-mahti-SCRATCH/genomes/zebrafish.tar Starting to copy data from allas... Object: 2001659-mahti-SCRATCH/genomes/zebrafish.tar copied and uncompressed from allas into: zebrafish
After this, the current working directory in Puhti has a new directory, zebrafish, that contains the files that were previously uploaded from Mahti to Allas.
[kkayttaj@puhti-login12 kkayttaj]$ ls zebrafish/ Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.1.bt2 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.3.bt2 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.2.bt2 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.4.bt2 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.rev.1.bt2 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.rev.2.bt2 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa.fai
Example 2: Using Allas with rclone
A. Uploading data with rclone
Rclone is the power user tool for Allas. It is good in cases where the data must be stored as each file being a separate object.
Warning
Rclone provides a fast and effective way to use Allas, but you should use it carefully as rclone operations can overwrite and remove data both in Allas and in the local disk environment without notifying or asking for confirmation.
This example uses the same data as the previous case: in the scratch directory of Mahti, we have a sub directory genomes/zebrafish that contains the eight files listed below:
ls /scratch/project_2001659/genomes/zebrafish Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.1.bt2 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.2.bt2 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.3.bt2 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.4.bt2 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.rev.1.bt2 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.rev.2.bt2 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa.fai
To copy the content of this directory to Allas, we first login to mahti.csc.fi and set up the Allas environment:
module load allas
allas-conf. The command asks for the CSC password (xxxxxxxxxxx) and
then lists the Allas projects that are accessible for the user. In this case, we select project_2001659.
[kkayttaj@mahti-login11 ~]$ allas-conf Please enter CSC password for account kkayttaj: xxxxxxxxxx Checking projects available for your account. Please wait. 1) project_2000982 2) project_2001659 3) project_2000136 4) abort allas_conf Please choose a project by giving an item number from the list above: 2 allas connection configured successfully. Connection stays active for eight hours.
The allas-conf procedure above defines an Allas connection that is valid for eight hours.
Next, I go to the genomes directory.
cd /scratch/project_2001659/genomes
Instead of a-put that was used in the previous example, we use command rclone copyto to copy all
files from the given directory to Allas. In the case of rclone, there is no default bucket. Instead, we have
to define a bucket. In this example, I use the bucket name 2001659-genomes and
define each object name to have the prefix zebrafish.
rclone copyto zebrafish/ allas:2001659-genomes/zebrafish
After copying the files, I use rclone ls to see what has been uploaded to Allas.
[kkayttaj@mahti-login11 genomes] rclone ls allas:2001659-genomes/zebrafish
450646234 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.1.bt2
334651392 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.2.bt2
187325 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.3.bt2
334651387 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.4.bt2
450646234 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.rev.1.bt2
334651392 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.rev.2.bt2
1362788082 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa
715 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa.fai
B. Downloading the data to Puhti
Next, we download the same data to Puhti. After connecting to puhti.csc.fi, we go to the scratch directory of project_2001659 and load the allas module:
cd /scratch/project_2001659
module load allas
allas-conf command:
allas-conf project_2001659
mkdir kkayttaj
cd kkayttaj/
rclone lsd to check the available buckets in Allas:
[kkayttaj@puhti-login12 kkayttaj]$ rclone lsd allas: 3268222761 2020-10-03 10:01:42 8 2001659-genomes 2576778428 2020-10-03 10:01:42 4 2001659-mahti-SCRATCH
Now we see two buckets. 2001659-genomes is the one that was just created in this
example, while 2001659-mahti-SCRATCH originates from the previous a-command example.
Next, we list the objects in the 2001659-genomes bucket:
[kkayttaj@puhti-login12 kkayttaj]$ rclone ls allas:2001659-genomes
450646234 zebrafish/Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.1.bt2
334651392 zebrafish/Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.2.bt2
187325 zebrafish/Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.3.bt2
334651387 zebrafish/Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.4.bt2
450646234 zebrafish/Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.rev.1.bt2
334651392 zebrafish/Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.rev.2.bt2
1362788082 zebrafish/Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa
715 zebrafish/Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa.fa
Finally, we use the rclone copyto command to copy the data from Allas to Puhti in a new directory zebrafish2.
[kkayttaj@puhti-login12 kkayttaj]$ rclone -P copyto allas:2001659-genomes/zebrafish zebrafish2 Transferred: 3.044G / 3.044 GBytes, 100%, 323.600 MBytes/s, ETA 0s Errors: 0 Checks: 0 / 0, - Transferred: 8 / 8, 100% Elapsed time: 9.6s [kkayttaj@puhti-login12 kkayttaj]$ ls zebrafish2 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.1.bt2 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.3.bt2 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.2.bt2 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.4.bt2 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.rev.1.bt2 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa Danio_rerio.GRCz10.91.rev.2.bt2 Danio_rerio.GRCz10.fa.fai
Example 3: Uploading large files to Allas
In the previous two examples, the actual amount of data was rather moderate, only some gigabytes. If the size of an individual data file is hundreds of gigabytes or more, the transport of only a few files may take longer than the duration of the token-based Allas authentication.
In this example, I use a-put to upload a set of large files from Mahti to Allas.
The first thing to do is to open a Mahti connection that can remain running for a long time. In this example, I use screen command to open a session that I can leave running in the background.
ssh csc-username@mahti.csc.fi
screen
screen command starts a virtual session in the login node of Mahti. You can leave this virtual screen session
running in the background and log out from Mahti but you should check which login node (mahti-login11, mahti-login12, mahti-login13 or mahti-login14)
your session is running on because you need to log in to the same node to reconnect to your screen session later on.
In the screen session, I first load the allas module and use allas-conf to establish a connection to Allas.
module load allas
allas-conf -k
allas-conf is used with the option -k that saves the Allas password in an environment variable ($OS_PASSWORD),
so that the connection to Allas can later be automatically reconfigured without the need to define the password again.
After opening the Allas connection, we move to the directory my_data where I have a set of subdirectories (50, 90, 100). I list the gzip-compressed files in these directories:
[kkayttaj@mahti-login11 ~] cd /scratch/project_2001659/my_data [kkayttaj@mahti-login my_data] ls -lh */*.gz -rw-rwxr-x 1 kkayttaj csc 45G May 8 12:57 100/uniref100.fasta.gz -rw-rwxr-x 1 kkayttaj csc 61G Jun 5 13:09 100/uniref100.xml.gz -rw-rwxr-x 1 kkayttaj csc 589M Jun 5 13:09 50/uniref50.fasta.gz -rw-rwxr-x 1 kkayttaj csc 17G Jun 5 13:09 50/uniref50.xml.gz -rw-r-xr-x 1 kkayttaj csc 4.2G Jul 6 09:46 90/uniref90.fasta.gz -rw-rwxr-x 1 kkayttaj csc 33G Jun 5 13:09 90/uniref90.xml.gz
Next, I launch the upload process. In this case, I do not use the default bucket name but assign the name to be 2001659-uniref
a-put -b 2001659-uniref */*.gz
We could launch the same upload alternative with rclone copy:
for f in */*.gz
do
rclone copy $f allas:2001659-uniref
done
we can leave the session running in the background by pressing Ctrl-a d.
Now, we can log out from Mahti, but the screen session remains active in the Mahti login node I use (in this case, mahti-login11).
To connect to this session, we first connect to the Mahti node where the screen session is running:
ssh csc-username@mahti-login11.csc.fi
screen -r
Once the a-put command is finished, we will run a-check command to check if all the data objects have been created.
a-check needs to be executed with exactly the same options that were used with the a-put command.
So in this case the command would be:
a-check -b 2001659-uniref */*.gz
The a-check command compares the item names to be uploaded to the matching objects in Allas. The files or directories that don't have a target object Allas, are reported and stored to a file. In this case, if some of the objects in the a-put command above would be missing, then a-check would list the missing files and directories in file missing_2001659-uniref_63449 (the number in the end is just a random number).
This file of missing items can be used with a-put option --input-list, to continue the failed upload process:
a-put -b 2001659-uniref --nc --input-list missing_2001659-uniref_63449
Example 4: Uploading complex directory structures to Allas
Some workflows and software create complex directory structures to store and manage data. You might have directories that have thousands or even millions of individual files. Copying these kinds of datasets to Allas takes time and is not always straightforward. The most reasonable way to upload this kind of data depends on the case. This example introduces a few alternatives.
First, I open a screen session on Puhti and set up an Allas connection just like in the previous example:
ssh csc-username@puhti.csc.fi
screen
module load allas
allas-conf -k
Suppose we have a directory structure that contains images of road condition cameras from ten locations with an interval of ten minutes from the years 2014–2018. The data is located in the directory road_cameras where each location has its own subdirectory (ten directories). Inside each subdirectory, there is another layer of subdirectories, one for each year (five subdirectories), each containing subdirectories for every day of the year (further 365 subdirectories), each containing 144 small image files.
For example:
road_cameras/site_7/2017/day211/image_654887.jpg
In principle, you could copy all 2,6 million files as separate objects to Allas, but in that case, you should split the data into multiple buckets as one bucket can have at most 0,5 million objects. You could, for example, run a separate rclone command for each site directory
and put the data from each site to a site-specific bucket:
rclone copyto road_cameras/site_1 allas:2001659_road_cameras_site_1/
As another extreme option, your could use a-put and collect all data into one archive object. In order to do that, you
must add the option --skip-filelist to the a-put command. By default, a-put collects detailed metadata of each file in a ameta file.
However, if you have millions of files, collecting this information takes a long time. If you need to know the file names,
you can use the --simple-fileslist option to collect the names – but no other information – of the files in the metadata file.
This already speeds up the preprocessing significantly. However, as in this case the naming has been systematic, storing the file names to the metadata files can be just ignored altogether (--skip-filelist), which is the fastest option.
a-put --skip-filelist road_cameras/
In practice, the optimal way of storing the data is often between these two extremes. As a compromise, you could apply packing at a higher level in the hierarchy.
For example:
a-put road_cameras/site_*
a-put road_cameras/site_*/20*
Copying millions of files to Allas takes a long time regardless of the method. If you have started the a-put command inside a screen session, you can detach from the virtual session by pressing Ctrl-a-d to log out from Puhti and leave the upload process running for days.
Once the a-put command is finished, you can run a-check command to check if all the data objects have been created.
You should run a-check using exactly the same options that you used with a-put. So in this case the command could be:
a-check --skip-filelist road_cameras/site_*/20*
The a-check command compares the item names to be uploaded to the matching objects in Allas. The files or directories that don't have a target object Allas, are reported and stored to a file. In this case, if some of the objects in the a-put command above would be missing, then a-check would list the missing files and directories in file missing_bucket_name_number (the number in the end is just a random nuber).
This file of missing items can be used with a-put option --input-list, to continue the failed upload process:
a-put -b 2001659-uniref --nc --input-list missing_bucket_name_number