Temporary Disk Space

Systems & Access :: Learning to Use :: Linux Computing Resource

All users must use the /tmp or /scratch filesystem as their working directory for all jobs.

The /tmp filesystem is available locally on each node. Please refer to the following page for the /tmp disk space available on each node: http://www.usc.edu/hpcc/systems/use-l-0.php#queue. Users should use the directory created exclusively for each job defined by the environment variable $TMPDIR(and not /tmp). Users have access to the /tmp of a particular node only when a job is running on that node; /tmp is not otherwise accessible. The files created in /tmp are deleted before the next job starts.

The /scratch is a shared temporary filesystem. /scratch is created when a new job starts, and it is deleted at the end of the job. The /scratch filesystem should be used to store temporary files that need to be accessed from all the nodes. If you need the files in the /scratch file system saved, explicitly copy them before the end of the job to a permanent storage disk.

Files on the temporary file systems are not backed up. It is the user's responsibility to copy important data to permanent file systems. While HPCC will try to protect user files for the stated retention periods, hardware failures could result in data loss.

If the performance of a computing resource is degraded by a temporary file system that has too little available free space, then HPCC management may compress some user files, move some files to another file system, or delete some files that have been accessed within the last five days.