Databases

The MIT SuperCloud allows users to launch their own databases through the database portal. The portal is located at:

https://txe1-portal.mit.edu/db/dbstatus.php

This page requires you to authenticate into the portal. From here you will see all the databases you have access to. We currently support Accumulo (1.5.0, 1.6.0, 1.7.0, and 1.8.0) and PostgreSQL databases through our dynamic database capability.

To start up a database instance, press "Start". You can stop it by clicking on the "Stop" button, and can checkpoint a stopped database as well. Clicking on "View Info" for Accumulo databases will take you to the Accumulo Monitoring page, where you can view ingest/query plots and current tables.

For most of your database uses, you are unlikely to need more information than what the above web portal database interfaces provide. However, in some cases you may need to get more information. For each of your databases, much more instance information is available on the central storage at /home/gridsan/groups/databases/<database-name>/.

If you need an instance created and cannot use one of those already available, contact us. Let us know the type of database you need, what you are using it for, what it should be called, and who should have access to the database. Let us know if there are any special configurations you need.

There are many ways to insert and query data. While this cannot be done from the portal page, you can query and insert data from any of the nodes on the MIT SuperCloud system. We recommend using D4M, which has been installed and pre-configured to work on our system with very little effort. For more information about databases and how to use them with D4M, take a look at the Advanced Database Technologies course on our online course platform. This course contains a good introduction on how to set up a data pipeline, including parsing, ingesting, and querying data for Accumulo.