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File Systems

caution

It is your responsibility as a user of our facilities to backup all your critical data. We only guarantee a daily backup of user data under /gpfs/home. Any other 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 3 different types of storage available in the cluster:

  • Root filesystem: Is the filesystem where the operating system resides
  • FEFS: FEFS is a distributed networked filesystem which can be accessed from all the nodes.
  • GPFS filesystem: GPFS is a distributed networked filesystem which has two partitions in this machine gpfs_home and gpfs_projects. Both can be accessed from login nodes and Data Transfer Machine but only gpfs_home is mounted on computing nodes too.

Root Filesystem​

The root file system, where the operating system is stored has its own partition.

There is a separate partition of the local hard drive mounted on /tmp that can be used for storing user data as you can read in Local Hard Drive.

Parallel Filesystems​

The Fujitsu Exabyte File System (FEFS) is a scalable cluster file system based on Lustre with high reliability and high availability for all nodes of the cluster. Besides, the IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) is a high-performance shared-disk file system providing fast, reliable data access from all nodes of the cluster to a global filesystem.

These filesystems allow parallel applications simultaneous access to a set of files (even a single file) from any node that has the file system mounted while providing a high level of control over all file system operations.

The following filesystems are used in the cluster:

  • /apps (softlink to /fefs/apps): Over this filesystem will reside the applications and libraries that have already been installed on the machine. Take a look at the directories to know the applications available for general use.

  • /home (softlink to /gpfs/home): This filesystem has the home directories of all the users, and when you log in you start in your home directory by default. 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. Also, it is highly discouraged to run jobs from this filesystem. Please run your jobs on your group’s /scratch instead.

  • /gpfs/projects: In addition to the home directory, there is a directory in /gpfs/projects for each group of users. For instance, the group bsc01 will have a /gpfs/projects/bsc01 directory ready to use. This space is intended to store data that needs to be shared between the users of the same group or project. A quota per group will be enforced depending on the space assigned by Access Committee. It is the project’s manager responsibility to determine and coordinate the better use of this space, and how it is distributed or shared between their users. This filesystem is not mounted on computing nodes, you have to transfer you data and launch your jobs from /scratch/<unixgroup>/ <username>

  • /scratch (softlink to /fefs/scratch): It is the only filesystem intended for executions. There is a directory for every group inside it and a subdirectory for every user in the group directory. It is mounted on every node, login and computing nodes. You must transfer all your necessary scripts, input files and any other kind of data to this filesystem before launching a job.