Disk Information

Status
Yes

There are basically three types of storage on the clusters:

There is a /home filesystem on each cluster which is available to all the nodes. If you're not terribly interested in disk storage, just put all your stuff in /home (where you are when you login) and run everything from there. On knot this is a high performance storage system, so it should be suitable for almost everybody.

There is local storage on each node in /scratch_local. This would be the fastest if you're reading and writing lots of small files on a single node during a job (e.g. scratch files). You don't have a directory there, but you should just try to make on in your .job file if you are going to use it, e.g.

mkdir /scratch_local/pcw  

These files are purged periodically, so don't leave valuable files there. At the end of your job you can copy them back to /home- and while the jobs are running you can see them in the /nodes directory, e.g. /nodes/node34 will show you the contents of the/scratch_local filesystem on node34

There is a central filesystem for storing large datasets that you aren't currently working with, but want to keep at CSC. Access at /central/username (where username is your username of course).  Please don't treat this as permanent archival storage - money we have to spend on this type of storage is money that doesn't go into new, faster nodes!!! Talk to one of us if you need long term storage.

You can access the /home directories of one cluster from another one, for example, to copy files from 'guild' to 'knot' on knot you can

cd /csc/guild/pcw

(that's pcw's home directory) and then tar, or cp files to /home.

How to transfer files to/from your computer

You can either use:

a SFTP client, such as WinSCP, CyberDuck,FileZilla, or any other SFTP program that you like

or GlobusOnlineGlobusOnline which offers some nice automatic restart and background transfer abilities