Taiga and Granite are two closely integrated systems created by NCSA. Although they work together, they have different functions.
Taiga is NCSA’s Global File System for all non-HIPAA environments within the National Petascale Computation Facility. By providing a center-wide, single-namespace file system available across multiple platforms, Taiga allows researchers to access their data on multiple systems at the same time. This enables them to run science pipelines across batch, cloud and container resources.
Granite, on the other hand, is NCSA’s Tape Archive system. Integrated closely with Taiga, Granite gives users a place to store long-term archive datasets. All data given to Granite is replicated to two tapes for mirrored protection. This gives the user some protection from tape failure. In fact, Taiga’s integration with Granite allows users to stage out data to their tape allocation for long-term storage.