HSI

Overview

The HSI utility allows automatic authentication and provides a user-friendly command line and interactive interface to HPSS. HSI is the preferred method of accessing HPSS.

Features of HSI include the following:

  • Password security: passwords are not transmitted in clear text over the network.
  • Usability in pipelines and shell scripts and in batch jobs.
  • Support for command stacking (multiple commands per line).
  • Support for interactive or one-liner (i.e., command-line-only) modes.
  • Support for abbreviations for most commands and keywords.
  • Support for recursion for many common commands (GET, PUT, REMOVE, LIST).
  • Extensive online full-screen help.

Using HSI

Issuing the command

hsi

will start HSI in interactive mode. Alternatively, you can use

hsi [options] command(s)

to execute a set of HSI commands and then return. Note that you may need to add /opt/public/bin to your search path to find the HSI executable.

If you want to upload several small files (less than 1 GB per file), you should tar the files up before storing them in HPSS. Below is an example of storing and getting a bunch of files in a directory using tar and HSI. HSI can read from standard input and write to standard output.

  tar cvf - . | hsi put - : <filename.tar>
  hsi get - : <filename.tar> | tar xvf -

Users will be prompted for their PASSCODE when running HSI. See the reference manual for command line options and other startup information.

HSI Documentation

More information on HSI may be found from the NCCS systems through the command

hsi help

Direct Transfers between HPSS and Remote Systems (e.g., User Workstations)

Because HSI is a third-party package, clients may be available for your system. However, the NCCS currently supports access to the HPSS only through HSI clients on the HPC systems. To transfer data directly to or from the NCCS HPSS, you will need to use an NCCS resource as a staging system. For example, to transfer data from your directory on HPSS to a system outside the NCCS, you will need to copy the data in reasonable chunks to an NCCS system using the HSI utility. Once a portion of the data is on an NCCS system, you can use a utility such as BBCP or SFTP/SCP to move the data to the system outside the NCCS.