FASTER:Filesystems and Files

File Systems, Quotas and File Transfers

File Space

Global file space on FASTER is available on all compute and login nodes. It is organized in the two 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/USERID	$HOME	DDN	10 GB	10000	Upon login, you will be situated in /home/$USER. The use of this area is for small-to-modest amount of processing: small software, scripts, compiling, editing. Its space and file count limits are not extensible. This area is backed up on a nightly basis.
Scratch	/scratch/user/USERID	$SCRATCH	DDN	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.
Project	/scratch/group/PROJECTID	$PROJECT	DDN	5 TB	500000	This is a high performance storage for specific storage allocation requests. Not purged while allocation is active. Removed 90 days after allocation expiration.

Quotas & File Use

A user can run the showquota home-wrapper command to display file usage on FASTER. Below is a sample output of command showquota.

[NetID@FASTER1 ~]$ showquota
Your current disk quotas are:
Disk                   Disk Usage      Limit   File Usage      Limit
/home/userid                 1.4G      10.0G         3661      10000
/scratchuser/userid        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 FASTER login nodes. All FASTER 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 FASTER login nodes. We suggest "rsync" which supports intermittent transfer. For transferring large amount of data to or from off campus, use Globus Connect with "TAMU FASTER-dtn1" or "TAMU FASTER-dtn2" as the endpoint.

For transferring files on FASTER 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 from the login nodes.

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