Storage areas

This page describes the directories / file systems that are available to each user for storing files and data sets. To see how many space is available on /home, /data, or /scratch, the pgquota can be used. Please refer to the Quota page for more information.

Each user of the system has its own home directory in /home. This is the directory you will be in after logging in to the system. Since we do make a tape backup of this area the amount of space for each user is limited using quotas. Currently the limit is 20GB by default.
The data on /home is available on all nodes in the system.

Each user of the system also has a directory in /data, which is meant for storing large amounts of data. Please be aware that backups of this data are not made. This means that you have to copy important data to other storage yourself.

Also on /data quotas are applied to prevent the system from running out of space. Currently the limit is 250GB by default. If this limit is too low for your research purposes, you can request us to change this limit.
The data on /data is available on all nodes in the system.

There is also a shared file system available for temporary data. Data stored here is visible on all the nodes. To prevent the system from filling up we will automatically remove files older than 30 days from this area. On /scratch a directory is available for each user. We also create a temporary directory on /scratch for each job. This directory can be reached using the environment variable $SCRATCHDIR. This directory will be automatically cleaned after the job is finished. You can use $SCRATCHDIR in the same way as $TMPDIR, which is explained below.

Each node of the cluster has 1TB of internal disk space. Most of this space is mounted under the path /local. This space is only available for running jobs. For each job a temporary directory is created on this disk. This directory can be reached using the environment variable $TMPDIR. To prevent people from storing data permanently these directories are removed automatically after the jobs is finished. This means that you have to copy away important data from this location at the end of your job script.

Note that the disk space in /local is not shared between the nodes. You cannot access the files on one machine from another, without copying them explicitly over the network.

You can use the name of directory in your job scripts using $TMPDIR. The $ sign denotes that you are referring to the environment variable TMPDIR. Examples:

Change directory:

cd $TMPDIR

Copy files to the temporary directory:

cp mydirectory/* $TMPDIR