Accessing HPC Storage from Nextcloud

The other direction from Accessing Nextcloud from HPC: bringing HPC/Elja storage into Nextcloud as an external storage share, so it shows up alongside your regular Nextcloud folders. See the official manual's External Storage chapter for how the feature works in general (other backend types, shared vs. personal mounts, etc.) — what's below is specific to connecting it to HPC/Elja.

There are two ways to set this up:

Manual, per-user setup

Click your profile icon in the upper right corner to open the menu, navigate to Personal settings > External storage. Then click Add external storage, and in the popup window enter the following:

• Folder name = name of choice for new folder to be created in Nextcloud
• External storage = SFTP (SSH file transfer)
• Authentication select 'RSA public key', Storage configuration 'elja.hi.is'
• Port = 22
• Root = /hpchome/[your username]/[directory name]
• Public key = the public part of the key you normally use for Elja (or create a new key pair)

If the connection was successful, the new folder will appear in your Nextcloud home folder.

Common use case for this setup is when you are working on a project on Elja and running batch jobs on Slurm collecting output into a folder, and want to download the results to your computer. Or you want to share a file/folder with a colleague.

Permanent, sysadmin-configured setup

For larger-scale projects, a permanent external storage mount can be set up by IREI's system administrator instead of each user in the team configuring their own connection. The HPC storage volume subsequently works much like a team folder. This is useful for making existing dedicated project volumes accessible from Nextcloud for the team, given that data security policies for the project allow this.

Please contact IREI administrators directly via irei@hi.is to set this up.