Mounting UoM storage shares (e.g. Research Data Storage (RDS) shares) on computers located off-campus may not be the most efficient way of accessing large data sets and could possibly be contrary to any existing data sharing agreements. You may find accessing the data is slow and at times unresponsive with your local network speed to blame.

If this is the case then why not use one of our central compute platforms such as the CSF / iCSF to access and run analysis on the data? This ensures the data flow remains on-campus using dedicated fast links and should help to speed up any analysis. As well as the central compute platforms, we also provide an RDS-SSH service which can be used for securely accessing RDS shares, allowing users to copy files between shares efficiently, as well as performing large scale uploads/downloads.

In addition, Research IT already provide access to a variety of centrally hosted datasets, including the UK Biobank full release. This saves UK Biobank approved projects huge amounts of storage and provides convenient read-only access to the data via our central compute platforms as well as from on-campus desktops. Your project will need its own storage for any output/result files you generate. So long as your project has been approved by the UK Biobank and access has been provided, you can begin working with the data almost immediately.

If you want to request an account on one of the central compute platforms, need access to an existing centrally hosted dataset, or have a dataset that is accessed by a number of different research groups that may benefit from being hosted centrally then please get in touch for an informal chat.