File Systems#

On Levante, a global Lustre file systems with a total storage capacity of 130 PetaBytes is available. Users have access to two different storage spaces on this system: WORK and SCRATCH. In addition, the HOME storage space is provided by a VAST file system. 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. Besides backups, daily snapshots are provided. Each snapshot is kept for one week.
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 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 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	quota -A -s -u $USER	lfsquota.sh -p <projectid>	lfsquota.sh -u $USER
Snapshots	YES Daily, kept for 1 week	NO	NO
Backup	YES please contact User Support to restore deleted files that are not covered by snapshots described above	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

Snapshots on HOME#

We provide daily snapshots that are created at 3 a.m. Each snapshot is kept for one week.

Within each users home directory a .snapshot directory can be found. Furthermore, in each child directory a .snapshot directory exists. Entering a snapshot that way preserves the hierarchy. This directory is not visible to any tools like ls and must be entered manually, e.g., using cd .snapshot. Autocompletion is also not available for this specific directory. After entering a .snapshot directory, all available snapshots can be listed using regular tools like ls.

$ ls
home_2025-10-10_01_00_00_UTC  home_2025-10-12_01_00_00_UTC  home_2025-10-14_01_00_00_UTC  home_2025-10-16_01_00_00_UTC  home_2025-10-18_01_00_00_UTC  home_2025-10-20_01_00_00_UTC
home_2025-10-11_01_00_00_UTC  home_2025-10-13_01_00_00_UTC  home_2025-10-15_01_00_00_UTC  home_2025-10-17_01_00_00_UTC  home_2025-10-19_01_00_00_UTC

Each directory represents a snapshot taken at that specific time (UTC+2) and is read-only. You can freely move within a snapshot as in any other file system. Using standard tools like cp and rsync, the contents of a snapshot can be copied back into a writeable location.

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.