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File Transfer

Prerequisites

To work through these guides you must

  • Be a member of a project in the BriCS portal
  • Have followed the instructions in Getting Started to set up SSH login and create a valid SSH certificate for authenticating to BriCS facilities (using the clifton command line tool)
  • PROJECT and FACILITY within this page correspond to the values that appear in SSH host names generated by clifton, as described in the Login guide

This guide outlines how to:

If you wish to transfer data between different BriCS facilities (noting that Isambard-AI phase 1 and phase 2 are different facilities), please copy via an external location or have the project PI raise a helpdesk ticket to seek administrator assistance.

Transferring files between your local machine and BriCS facilities

Having setup ssh access as described in Getting Started, you can use scp or rsync to transfer files over SSH protocol.

For example to copy remote_file.txt from the remote login node to your local machine, the following can be used:

scp PROJECT.FACILITY.isambard:remote_file.txt .

rsync -avz PROJECT.FACILITY.isambard:remote_file.txt .

To copy local_file.txt from your local machine to the remote login node, the following can be used:

scp local_file.txt PROJECT.FACILITY.isambard:

rsync -avz local_file.txt PROJECT.FACILITY.isambard:

To copy a directory recursively, we use the -r flag with scp, and the -a flag with rsync. For example:

scp -r local_dir PROJECT.FACILITY.isambard:

rsync -avz local_dir PROJECT.FACILITY.isambard:

Transferring files between projects on the same BriCS facility

Seek permission from your PI

When transferring data between projects, care should be taken not to breach privacy or licensing. Please consult with the PI of the project before transferring data. The PI is legally responsible for any breach.

To transfer files from one project to another on the same facility, we outline the following methods:

Using public shared storage

You can use cp to copy files to and from your project public shared storage. E.g. to copy a directory recursively to your project public shared storage:

cp -r dir /projects/public/PROJECT

Project Public Shared Storage

/projects/public/PROJECT is configured to be writeable by members of the project, and readable by all users of the facility.

Using scp/rsync and clifton

You will need to install and run clifton from your source project account. First, you should generate a ssh-key pair if you have not already done so, then follow the Clifton "Install" and "Authenticate" instructions.

Once you have authenticated using clifton, you can then use scp or rsync to transfer files between projects on the same facility, e.g. to transfer a directory recursively from your source project account to your destination project PROJECT2:

scp -r dir USER.PROJECT2@localhost:

rsync -avz dir USER.PROJECT2@localhost:

Graphical interfaces

There are number of graphical file transfer programs and we currently do not provide specific instructions for a particular program.

As an alternative, if you simply want to view and work with your remote files using a graphical interface (rather than transferring them to your local machine), consider using Visual Studio Code or Jupyter notebooks.