Firewalled Environment Storage Overview

Storage

Our servers mount two types of shared storage; home directories and group storage directories. These home directories will mount over the network to all shared compute servers and the phoenix cluster, so any server you login to will have these filesystems available:

Filesystem Specifications

Filesystem	/private/home	/private/groups
Default Soft Quota	30 GB	15 TB
Default Hard Quota	31 GB	16 TB
Total Capacity	19 TB	500 TB
Access Speed	Slow - Moderate (Spinning Disk)	Very Fast (NVMe Flash Media)
Intended Use	This space should be used for login scripts, small bits of code or software repos, etc. No large data should be stored here.	This space should be used for large computational/shared data, large software installations and the like.

Home Directories (/private/home/username)

Your home directory will be located as "/private/home/username" and has a 30GB soft quota and a 31GB hard quota. Your home directory is meant for small scripts and login data, or a git repo. Please do not try to store large data there or computer on large jobs using data in your home directory.

Groups Directories (/private/group/groupname

The group storage directories are created per PI, and each group directory has a default 15TB soft quota and 16TB hard quota. For example, if David Haussler is the PI that you report to directly, then the directory would exist as /private/groups/hausslerlab. Request access to that group directory and you will then be able to write to it. Each of those group directories are shared by the lab it belongs to, so you must be wary of everyone's data usage and share the 15TB available per group accordingly.

On the compute servers you can check your group's current quota usage by using the '/usr/bin/viewquota' command. You can only check the quota of a group you are part of (you would be a member of the UNIX group of the same name). If you wanted to check the quota usage of /private/groups/hausslerlab for example, you would do:

$ viewquota hausslerlab

Project quota on /export (/dev/mapper/export)
Project ID   Used   Soft   Hard Warn/Grace   
---------- --------------------------------- 
hausslerlab   1.8T    15T    16T  00 [------]

Soft Versus Hard Quotas

We use soft and hard quotas for disk space.

Once you exceed a directory's soft quota, a one-week countdown timer starts. When that timer runs out, you will no longer be able to create new files or write more data in that directory. You can reset the countdown timer by dropping down to under the soft quota limit.

You will not be permitted to exceed a directory's hard quota at all. Any attempt to try will produce an error; the precise error will depend on how your software responds to running out of disk space.

When quotas are first applied to a directory, or are reduced, it is possible to end up with more data or files in the directory than the quota allows for. This outcome does not trigger deletion of any existing data, but will prevent creation of new data or files.

/scratch Space on the Servers

Each server will generally have a local /scratch filesystem that you can use to store temporary files. BE ADVISED that /scratch is not backed up, and the data there could disappear in the event of a disk failure or anything else. Do not store important data there. If it is important, it should be moved somewhere else very soon after creation.