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scratch filesystems

/scratch is a shared high performance storage that system provides access to large amounts of disk for short periods of time at much higher speed than /dipc. It meant to be used as the work space for jobs.

Warning

You should use it only to submit jobs from and to redirect all your I/O.

Everytime a new user account is created the system will also create a subdirectory under /scratch filesystem of the form /scratch/username.

Remember that /scratch filesystems are not meant to be used as a permanent storage solution. When the occupancy goes above 80% the BeeGFS filesystem shows a performance degradation that affects all users. The same applies with large numbers of small files, since the BeeGFS filesystem is not behaving ideally when dealing with high volumes of small files. Therefore, avoid having too many files (>1000) within the same directory.

Check your scratch usage

Since the usage of the /scratch filesystem is limited for each user (500GB in Atlas-FDR and 1.5TB in Atlas EDR) it may be useful to check your occupation:

$ beegfs-ctl --getquota --uid username

      user/group     ||           size          ||    chunk files    
     name     |  id  ||    used    |    hard    ||  used   |  hard   
--------------|------||------------|------------||---------|---------
    username  |  xxxx||   43.81 GiB|    1.46 TiB||   262281|  3000000
Remember that the number of files created in this filesystem is limited to 3,000,000.