Getting started

Queen Mary University of London has an active Globus license for transferring, sharing data via a web browser. It allows collaboration with other researchers, without requiring them to have accounts on QMUL systems. Globus uses widely-adopted industry standards for authentication and authorisation, as well as

GridFTP and HTTPS protocols. Globus lets you share data with collaborators at other research institutions, whether your data exists on Apocrita or a Laptop/PC

What can I do with Globus?

Transfer files

With Globus you can move many gigabytes of data between systems within your site or externally, and lets you use a web browser or command-line interface to submit transfers between various data collections. Globus allows you to move files between systems without downloading and uploading files from your local machine, which can often be slow and error prone.

Globus allows you to queue and schedule file transfers, so you do not need to have a constant connection to both source and target locations.

Share files with others

Most file-sharing services require you to copy your data to an external storage system. This sharing model is reasonable for small amounts of data but can be cumbersome, slow, and expensive for large research datasets. select directory paths to be securely shared with offsite collaborators and grant them read-only or read-write access.

Globus lets you share your data without requiring temporary accounts for your collaborators on the system where the data resides, so long as you have granted suitable permissions. Your collaborators receive an email with a link to the shared directory paths, and can then use Globus to transfer data from/to your storage system directly, without taking a detour through a third-party cloud storage provider.

First steps

To start using Globus, you need to activate a Globus Account.

After completing this step, you are in a position to start transferring data from an existing collection. Data transfer may be performed with a web browser, or optionally managed with the Globus Connect software.

If you are a data owner and wish to use Globus to share data, you have the option to share data from your PC, another server, or cloud with Globus Connect, or share from the Research Data Store on the Apocrita HPC cluster.

Apocrita and many of our managed storage solutions already have Globus Connect software deployed and running, and you do not need to install any software. If you are wanting to share files from a managed storage solution that is not yet globus enabled, please contact us and we can assist in getting this enabled, if possible.

If you wish to share new data sources or you need to upload or download larger datasets, you may need to install Globus Connect.

Sharing data from Apocrita

Globus allows sharing of data which resides in lab/project space on Apocrita, to other researchers, even external ones without Apocrita accounts. If write permission is granted, uploads are also possible. The PI/data owner of a project should contact us to request this facility. After the ITS Research team have performed the initial setup, the access to the collection may be managed by the data owner.