HPC/Directories

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Revision as of 19:37, November 9, 2009 by Stern (talk | contribs) (move over HOME and SANDBOX from HPC/Getting started)
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Overview

Here is a summary of key directories related to Carbon, and environment variables used to access them:

Environment variable Typical value Shared across nodes Notes
$HOME or ~ (tilde) /home/joe yes home sweet home
$SANDBOX /sandbox/joe yes extra storage, not backed up
$TMPDIR /tmp/pbs_mom/12345.mds01.... no job-specfic scratch
$PBS_O_WORKDIR (yes) the directory qsub was run in; typically used with cd $PBS_O_WORKDIR as first line in a job script

Details by function

Home directory

$HOME
~

The users' home directories are kept on a Lustre* file system and are backed up nightly. The home directory can be reached in standard Unix fashion using either the environment variable or the tilde sign in most shells (but generally not application programs, especially not those written in Fortran).

Sandbox - global scratch and overflow

$SANDBOX

For files that need to be shared among the nodes, and are possibly large and change often, use a "sandbox" directory. The environment variable points to a user-specific directory which is shared by Lustre*, but not backed up.


Local scratch space

$TMPDIR
  • resides on local disk on each node
  • typically provides about 100 GB of space
  • is the same for [MPI] processes on the SAME node (as many as given in "ppn=…")
  • (i.e., PBS job-specific, not Unix PID-specific)
  • is not shared across nodes
  • will be wiped upon job exit




(*) Lustre is a parallel file system that allows concurrent and coherent file access at high data rates.