Storage and data transfer

Personal storage $HOME $ cd $HOME $ pwd /cluster/home/username $HOME is a safe, long-term storage for critical data (program source, scripts, etc.) and is accessible only by the user (owner). This means other people cannot read its contents. There is a disk quota of 16/20 GB and a maximum of 80’000/100’000 files (soft/hard quota). You can check the quota with the command lquota. Its content is saved every hour/day/week using snapshot, which is stored in the hidden .snapshot directory.

Global Scratch $ cd $SCRATCH $ pwd /cluster/scratch/username $SCRATCH is a fast, short-term storage for computations running on the cluster. It is created automatically upon first access (cd $SCRATCH) and visible (mounted) only when accessed. It has strict usage rules (see $SCRATCH/__USAGE_RULES__ for details) and has no backup.

Local Scratch /scratch on each compute node ($TMPDIR) The local scratch is intended for serial, I/O-intensive applications. Therefore, it has a very short life span. Data are deleted automatically when the job ends. Scratch space must be requested by the job and has no backup. See how to use local scratch

Check your quota

Check your quota with the command

$ lquota

Screen output

+-----------------------------+-------------+------------------+------------------+------------------+
| Storage location:           | Quota type: | Used:            | Soft quota:      | Hard quota:      |
+-----------------------------+-------------+------------------+------------------+------------------+
| /cluster/home/jarunanp      | space       |         10.23 GB |         17.18 GB |         21.47 GB |
| /cluster/home/jarunanp      | files       |            66386 |            80000 |           100000 |
+-----------------------------+-------------+------------------+------------------+------------------+ 
| /cluster/shadow             | space       |          4.10 kB |          2.15 GB |          2.15 GB |
| /cluster/shadow             | files       |                2 |            50000 |            50000 |
+-----------------------------+-------------+------------------+------------------+------------------+
| /cluster/scratch/jarunanp   | space       |          5.99 GB |          2.50 TB |          2.70 TB |
| /cluster/scratch/jarunanp   | files       |            11176 |          1000000 |          1500000 |
+-----------------------------+-------------+------------------+------------------+------------------+

Group storage

Shareholders can buy the space on Project and Work as much as they need, and manage access rights. Quota can be checked with lquota. The content is backed up multiple times per week.

Project $ cd /cluster/project/groupname Similar to $HOME, but for groups, it is a safe, long-term storage for critical data.

Work $ cd /cluster/work/groupname Similar to global scratch, but without purge, it is a fast, short-or medium-term storage for large computations. The folder is visible only when accessed.

External Storage

The NAS share needs to be mountable via NFSv3 (shares that only support CIFS cannot be mounted on the HPC clusters), and exported to the subnet of our HPC clusters. The NAS is then mounted automatically on our clusters under

/nfs/servername/sharename

Central NAS Groups who have purchased storage on the central NAS of ETH can access it on our clusters.

Other NAS Groups who are operating their own NAS can export a shared file system via NFS to Euler. The user and group ID's on the NAS needs to be consistent with ETH user names and groups.

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Further reading

• User guide: Storage systems
• Too much space is used by your output files
• Best practices guide for Lustre file system