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File Systems

caution

It is your responsibility as a user of our facilities to backup all your critical data. Any backup should only be done exceptionally under demand of the interested user.

Each user has several areas of disk space for storing files. These areas may have size or time limits, please read carefully all this section to know about the policy of usage of each of these filesystems. There are 2 different types of storage available in this cluster:

  • Node's NFS filesystem: This filesystem is shared between all the nodes of the cluster. Any files needed for operation in FPGA nodes should be put first here.
  • FPGA's NFS filesystem: This filesystem is shared between all FPGAs.

GPFS Filesystem​

The access to the GPFS filesystem has been removed from the machine.

Node's NFS filesystem​

This NFS filesystem is intended to share files between all the nodes of the cluster without relying on GPFS. Note that it is the only way to make files available to the compute nodes that have FPGAs installed in them. It is divided into the following directories:

  • /nfs/apps: Over this filesystem will reside the applications and libraries to be used in FPGA nodes. Take a look at the directories to know the applications available for them. For this cluster, take into account that the only applications that will be installed there are applications to be used in FPGA nodes.

  • /nfs/home: This filesystem the personal space for each user in the NFS filesystem. Every user will have their own home directory to store own developed sources and their personal data. A default quota will be enforced on all users to limit the amount of data stored there.

  • /nfs/scratch: This is a filesystem for temporary data shared between nodes.

FPGA's NFS filesystem​

This filesystem is what is "seen" by all the FPGAs of the cluster. Its contents are not managed by the operations team.

Local Hard Drive​

Every node has a local solid state drive (SSD) that can be used as a local scratch space to store temporary files during executions of one of your jobs. This space is mounted over /scratch/tmp/$JOBID directory and pointed out by $TMPDIR environment variable. The amount of space within the /scratch filesystem can be checked in each machine System Overview. All data stored in these local drives at the compute nodes will not be available from the login nodes.

You should use the directory referred to by $TMPDIR to save your temporary files during job executions. This directory will automatically be cleaned after the job finishes.

Root Filesystem​

The root file system, where the operating system is stored doesn't reside in the node, this is a NFS filesystem mounted from one of the servers.

As this is a remote filesystem only data from the operating system has to reside in this filesystem. It is NOT permitted the use of /tmp for temporary user data. The local hard drive can be used for this purpose as you could read in Local Hard Drive.

Quota​

There is currently no quota defined in the cluster, in the future we might implement a quota system for the node's NFS filesystem.