Permanent storage¶
Ceph filesystem¶
The filesystem that servers users' home directories (/dipc) runs on top of a Ceph parallel filesystem. Ceph is an open-source software storage platform that implements object storage on a single distributed computer cluster.
The storage solution is almost 800 TB in size and no quotas are enforced so far. However, we kindly ask you to try to keep the occupancy of your home directory as low as possible. Otherwise, we will be forced to enforce user quotas.
Home directory¶
Your home directory is where you arrive by default when you login to the cluster or any access/login node. It is mounted on /dipc/username. It is intended for permanent file storage. Your shell refers to it as “∼” (tilde), and its absolute path is also stored in the environment variable $HOME. Your home directory is shared across all the HPC Systems at DIPC. The data stored here should be relatively small since it is meant to permanently store the most relevant information for your research. Note that various kinds of configuration files are also stored here: .bash_profile, .tcshrc, .vimrc, etc.
Tip
By default, your home directory allows access only to you, the owner. You can share this access by running chmod.
Warning
Remember that /dipc filesystem is only exported to the head nodes of the computing systems and the access nodes. Therefore, it will not be visible from any of the computing nodes of any of the supercomputing systems. Within the computing nodes /dipc is a symbolic link that points to /scratch. This is the reason why it is not recommended to submit jobs from your home directories. It is possible, but requires some scripting. Thus, submit your jobs from your /scratch directory.
Backups¶
Daily backups of these directories are performed and we save backups up to 2 months old. Thus, if you happen to lose any data, please us us and we will help you to recover it.