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Storage Space on the Cluster

Storage on the Cluster

Once you have your account set up on the ORC clusters, you will have access to the following storage options.

Home

/home/UserID
The /home directory is where you land when you first start a shell session on the cluster. From /home, you can navigate to the other spaces, including /scratch and /projects.

Properties of /home:

  • Read/write on the login nodes
  • On ARGO, /home is mounted read-only on the compute nodes - jobs cannot write to your home directory.
  • On HOPPER, /home is mounted read-write on all nodes - jobs can write to your home directory.
  • Limited to 60 GB per user. You will get an email warning to clear space once you approach this limit.
  • Backed up.

SCRATCH

/scratch/UserID

Properties of /scratch:

  • Read/write on every node - jobs can write output here
  • Scratch directories have no space limit
  • Temporary: Data in /scratch gets purged 90 days from the date of creation, so make sure to move your files to a safe place before the cycle ends.
  • /scratch is not backed up.

PROJECTS

/projects/project-owner
This is additional persistent free storage for projects whose storage requirements exceed the 50 GB that is available in the /home directory. Faculty can request up to 1 TB of disk space if needed. Students, Postdocs and collaborators should request access to available projects spaces via their PI/advisor/supervisor. To request a projects directory, the faculty (PI) should send an email to orchelp@gmu.edu asking for the projects directory to be created. They should also provide a (user ID) list of those that should be granted access to the /rpojects directory. If students/other group members need to be added to an existing /projects space, the PI should send an email to orchelp@gmu.edu asking that hte new members be added to the direvtory.

The /projects space is

  • On ARGO, read-only on the compute nodes.
  • On HOPPER, read-write on all the nodes.
  • Not backed up.

All these are free storage resources on the ORC clusters. If you need more storage space on the cluster, please send an email to orchelp@gmu.edu to discuss available paid storage options.

Storage Policies

When the storage space is exceeded, please refer to the Arbiter penalities policies