Ada:Filesystems and Files

File Systems, Quotas and File Transfers

Global file space on Ada is available on all compute, login, and extra-fast data transfer nodes. It is organized in the three file systems showing 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	$HOME	GSS26	10 GB	10000	Upon login, you will be situated in /home/$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	$SCRATCH	GSS26	1 TB	250000	This is a high performance storage, intended to temporarily hold rather large files, and only for on-going processing that uses them. It is NOT backed up nor is it intended as long-term storage area. Please delete or move out of these area any files that are not frequently used.
Tiered	/tiered/user/$USER	$ARCHIVE	GSS26	10 TB	50000	This is an archival file system intended to hold valuable data files that are not frequently used. Please delete or move elsewhere files that have been inactive for extended periods. Quotas will be in place, but space allocation is extensible upon justification and availability. /tiered is not accessible from the compute nodes.

Quotas & File Use: the showquota command

A user can run the showquota home-wrapper command to display file use on Ada. Future versions of the command will include use of the tiered file system. Below is a sample output of command showquota.

$ showquota
Your current disk quotas are:
Disk       Disk Usage      Limit    File Usage      Limit
/home          195.6M        10G           146      10000
/scratch       719.3G         1T          2898      250000
/tiered        114.9G        10T            44      50000

Transferring Files

Data transfer utilites scp, sftp, and rsync are available Ada login nodes and fast data transfer nodes. Two Ada login nodes (ada1.tamu.edu and ada2.tamu.edu) have 10 Gbps Ethernet connection to the intra-campus network, the remaining Ada login nodes have 1 Gigbit Ethernet connection to the intra-campus network. These are suitable for small-to-medium sized data transfers. For massive data transfer, use Globus Connect or GridFTP on the fast data transfer nodes: ada-ftn1.tamu.edu and ada-ftn2.tamu.edu to utilize 40 Gigabit Ethernet connection to Internet2.

For transferring files on Ada to/from a Windows machine, please use WinSCP.

See file transfer software comparison wiki page for more options.