HLRS Stuttgart — 57 of 262 user accounts de-registered, ~619 TB orphaned

Schembera and Durán 2020 audited the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart's tape archive (state of December 1, 2017) and identified 57 of 262 user accounts as de-registered, having left behind approximately 619 terabytes of dark data without active stewardship.

The measurement is one of the few institutional-scale audits of orphaned research data with named numbers. It illustrates the C-0017 mechanism at a single supercomputing center: roughly 22% of accounts are orphaned at any given time, and the data they hold is in administrative limbo — neither preserved with continued metadata stewardship nor cleared, with no clear party responsible for either disposition.

The Schembera-Durán paper introduces the "Scientific Data Officer" role as one institutional response. The architectural reading developed in C-0017 frames the problem differently: institutional infrastructure should not depend on a continued role at all; preservation should be a property of the deposit, not of the deposit-account ownership.