Storage system

The HPC3 provides 3 kinds of storage for different purposes.

  • Home directory for individual (100GB quota with backup for disaster recovery)
  • Scratch directory (For non-contributors: 1TB group-based quota. For contributors: quota depends on PI's purchase quantity. Highest performance using BeeGFS with no backup)
  • Archive directory (For contributors only: quota depends on PI's purchase quantity. Used as second copy of data with no backup)
Details

Home directory

Each HPC3 user will have 100GB storage quota for the home directory /home/$LOGNAME, the file system is a basic NFS (Network File System) connected with the InfiniBand (max throughput about 4Gbps). Backup for this directory will be arranged twice a day (in morning and night) for disaster recovery.  Users may put their program code, important files and result data that require better protection in this storage area. 

Scratch directory

This directory is under /scratch/PI/$pi_group and should be used for storage of i) project files for sharing among group members or ii) the source and intermediate data for computation.  This storage area is a very fast parallel storage system (BeeGFS) which have a max 100Gbps throughput.  A based 1TB quota would be available for all users while additional quota will be allocated to PI group according to the purchased quantity and it will be shared among the whole PI group.  Please note that users should not hold any important data in this directory without a backup copy since there is no data protection / backup for this directory.  The setup of this storage area span across different storage servers and hard disks and meant to achieve fast parallel read/write at very high speed for computational use.  Users under the same group may create more folders for different projects and change the folder permission if needed for temporary sharing.

Archive directory

This type of storage is only available for contributors.  This folder is is under /archive*/$pi_group and can be used for temporary storage of infrequently used data,  The file system is a basic NFS (Network File System) connected with the InfiniBand (max throughput about 4Gbps).  Please note that this folder also do not have backup and it should only be treated as an additional scratch area without fast parallel read/write . Quota of this directory will be setup according to each PI group’s purchase quantity.

Summary

  System Backups Default Quota Quota for 
/home NFS Yes 100GB Individual user
/scratch/PI/$pi_group  BeeGFS No From 1TB to PI's purchase quantity PI Group members
/archive1/$pi_group or /archive2/$pi_group NFS No PI's purchase quantity. Only available for contributors PI Group members

All of the above directories are accessible from the login and compute node so you may arrange your storage preference from your program. You may also create symbolic link in your home directory to access scratch and archive directory more easily as below:

ln -s /scratch/PI/$pi_group scratch

ln -s /archive2/$pi_group archive

 
NFS file system architecture BeeGFS parallel file system architecture