File Systems#

On Levante, two global Lustre file systems with a total storage capacity of 130 PetaBytes are available. Users have access to three different storage spaces: HOME, WORK, and SCRATCH. Each storage space has a specific purpose as described below:

HOME is the file system where users’ sessions start upon login to Levante. It is backed up and should be used to store shell setup files, source codes, scripts, and important files. Additionally, data is stored on fast SSD-backed storage.
WORK is a project space available through the allocations process and shared between all users of a project. It provides disk space for large amounts of data, but it is not backed up. It can be used e.g. for writing raw model output and processing of data that is accessible to all project members.
SCRATCH is provided for temporary storage and processing of large data. To prevent the file system from overflowing, old data is automatically deleted. The granted retention period is 14 days.

The Lustre file systems are available on all nodes (login and compute), so you can use them during interactive sessions and in batch jobs. The table below provides further details on different storage spaces.

File system	HOME	WORK	SCRATCH
Path	/home/[a,b,g,k,m,u]/<userid>	/work/<projectid>	/scratch/[a,b,g,k,m,u]/<userid>
Environment variable	$HOME
Description	Globally accessible Lustre file system Assigned to user account Storage of personal settings files, source codes and scripts Fast SSD storage	Globally accessible Lustre file system Assigned to project account Interim storage of output from running applications and frequently accessed data	Globally accessible Lustre file system Assigned to user account Temporary storage and processing of large data sets Regularily and indiscriminately touching all data is discouraged and will be inhibited if detected.
Quota	30 GiB	according to annual project allocation	15 TiB
Quota check	lfsquota.sh -u $USER	lfsquota.sh -p <projectid>	lfsquota.sh -u $USER
Backup	YES please contact User Support to restore files deleted by mistake	NO	NO
Automatic data deletion	NO	NO	YES
Data life time	until user account deletion	1 month after project expiration	14 days since the last file access

To evaluate storage tiering, an additional file system named FASTDATA is currently in experimental phase. Access is granted only on request.

Moving data on WORK#

All available Unix tools for copying and moving files on WORK can be used. However, moving files between different projects on WORK will be slow compared to moving files inside a project. Please contact us if you intend to move more than 5 TiB of data between two different projects.