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File Systems

File Space

Global file space on Terra is available on all compute and login nodes. It is organized in the two file systems shown in the table below. Access to the allocated file space is through the indicated directories that are setup automatically for every user.

File System Directory Environment Variable Storage Hardware File Space Quota File Counts Quota Comments
Home /home/$USER $HOME DSS-G260 10 GB 10000 Upon login, you will be situated in /home/$USER. The use of this area is for small-to-modest amount of processing. Its space and file count limits are not extensible. This area is backed up on a nightly basis.
Scratch /scratch/user/$USER $SCRATCH DSS-G260 1 TB 250000 This is a high performance storage, intended to temporarily hold rather large files, and only for on-going processing that uses them. It is NOT backed up nor is it intended as long-term storage area. Please delete or move out of these area any files that are not frequently used.

Quotas & File Use

A user can run the showquota command to display file usage on Terra.

[username@terra ~]$ showquota

Your current disk quotas are:
Disk                  Disk Usage      Limit   File Usage      Limit
/home/username              1.4G      10.0G         3661      10000
/scratch/user/username    117.6G       1.0T        24226     250000
/scratch/group/projectid  510.5G       5.0T       128523     500000

Transferring Files

Data transfer utilites scp,sftp, and rsync are available on the Terra login nodes. All Terra login nodes have 10 Gigbit Ethernet connection to the intra-campus network. These are suitable for small-to-medium sized data transfers, as transfer could be interrupted by 60 minute CPU process time limit on the Terra login nodes. We suggest "rsync" which supports intermittent transfer. For transferring large amount of data to or from off campus, use Globus Connect.

For transferring files on Terra to/from a Windows machine, you can use [MobaXterm or "WinSCP". Please see [instructions on using SFTP/SCP software with Duo. Use rclone to move data to/from cloud storage.

Please see file transfer wiki page for more details on choices of transfer software and answers to frequently asked questions.

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