Acacia is Pawsey's online research data storage system. It is a part of the Pawsey storage portfolio and can be accessed on the Pawsey servers as well as from anywhere on the Internet. Acacia's Internet address or endpoint is https://projects.pawsey.org.au.

Acacia is a modern Ceph object storage system which can be used by applications compatible with the Amazon S3 protocol. In practice, this means that instead of files, your data is stored as objects in buckets.

For further information visit - Acacia - User Guide

Using Acacia

Acacia provides a platform that you can use to store your data as long as your Pawsey project is active.  It should be used for data that is not being actively used within your Nimbus instance (e.g. input data). Data volumes, which you mount to your instances, should be used for this purpose.

In addition to storing research data for use within Pawsey, Acacia can be used for sharing data with researchers all over the world.

What software to use?

Access to Acacia is via client software that takes care of moving data to and from Acacia and managing data objects.  There are many software clients that are S3 compatible and that provide useful features.

Permissions

For Nimbus projects all members have full rights and access but no-one outside the project.  

You can allow anyone access to buckets on Acacia using a time-limited presigned URL.

A more complete and continuing bucket access control can be granted to other Acacia users and projects using policies. These consist of JSON formatted text files which contain the specific configuration desired.

Refer to Copying and sharing objects for more detailed guidance.