Description
The Open Storage Network (OSN) is an NSF-funded cloud storage resource, geographically distributed among storage pods. OSN is a collaboration between MGHPCC, SDSC, NCSA, Rice, JHU, and RENCI, with a federation of pod-owning sites and contributions from other advanced computing centers. Each OSN pod currently hosts 1.5 PB or more of storage, and is connected to R&E networks between 40 and 100Gbit. OSN storage is allocated in buckets and is accessible using S3 interfaces, including with tools such as Rclone, Cyberduck, and the AWS CLI, or via REST API interfaces.
RP Description
OSN is a distributed object-storage resource consisting of S3-compatible storage pods hosted at research institutions across the US. It is particularly well suited for active research data that needs to be reachable from anywhere over HTTPS rather than from one cluster, and is often used for moving large datasets off instruments, sharing long-tail datasets, and staging data for compute that runs elsewhere. It is reached through standard S3 tooling - AWS CLI, Cyberduck, Rclone and Restic - rather than a login shell or a mounted filesystem.
Login Text
Sign in at the [OSN Coldfront portal] with your ACCESS username and password - choose "Log in with Institutional Account", then "ACCESS CI (XSEDE)" from the identity-provider dropdown.
You need an ACCESS account with a password set, and an OSN allocation. There is no MFA and no separate OSN password.
There is no SSH and no shell. The portal is where you request buckets and get your access keys; everything else happens through S3 tooling against your bucket endpoint. See [OSN Portal] for what the portal can do.
File Transfer Text
OSN has no data transfer node and no command-line transfer host. You connect S3 tooling directly to your bucket's endpoint URL, using the access keys issued in the portal. Every client needs three things: the endpoint, the bucket name, and a key pair - read-write or read-only - unless the bucket is open for anonymous read.
Storage Text
OSN is S3-compatible object storage - no directories, mount paths, or shell access. Storage is organised as buckets within an OSN project; each bucket has an endpoint URL, a name, and up to two key pairs, and bucket names follow AWS S3 rules - lowercase, no spaces or underscores, and unique across all of OSN.
Project allocations run from 10 TB to 50 TB through the standard ACCESS process. Buckets are created in the portal, not from the command line.
1 ACCESS credit = 1 GB; Campus Champions may request 1 TB for testing. Above 50 TB, contact [OSN support].