Aether’s storage system

Storage space

Aether has three independent storage systems:

  • /home for users’ $HOME directories

  • /mnt/beegfs for the output data belonging to the users

  • /mnt/beegfs2 for large data sets (satellite data sets, ECMWF etc.)

The /home/$USER or simply $HOME is the directory that opens right after the user’s login and where user’s personal files are stored. Backups of the home directory are run daily (see Backup.). Therefore, it should be used for critical data: your job scripts, source code and unrecoverable input files.

There are tight quotas on $HOME and it will most probably be too small for the I/O of your jobs. The quotas were implementat to ensure that disk space can be made available to all users and that work is not blocked by the full file system. The default user quota on $HOME is 500 GB with a hard limit of 600 GB. Please be aware that output to a home directory that is over the hard quota will be truncated, i.e., files cannot be written anymore. A user can query his user quota on the login nodes using the command lsquota:

[$USER@login2 ~]$ lsquota

Storage Location   Quota type       Used    Soft Quota    Hard Quota    Grace Period
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/home/$USER        disk space    10064MB         500GB         600GB               -
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The output will list your total data usage your soft quota, and your hard limit. The “Grace Period” is the time during which you are allowed to write in $HOME above the soft limit and it has an initial value of 7 days.

An email notification will be sent to your email address associated with the Aether account when you go over your soft quota.

The data throughput from the BeeGFS storage to the compute nodes is considerably higher than that from the HOME storage. So if you deal with large amounts of data, it is advisable to place these in the BeeGFS.

Each user has her/his own directory located at /mnt/beegfs/user/$USERNAME. The user has full permissions over that directory. Apart from that, users are also permitted to write to directories inside /mnt/beegfs/pub. Please contact lamos_it+aether@groups.uni-bremen.de if you want to create a directory on the top level of /mnt/beegfs or /mnt/beegfs2.

Access from IUP-UB to Aether storage

The Aether’s storage systems are exported via Samba, so that Windows users in IUP-UB can access data stored on Aether directly. The host name to connect to is hstoraether.iup.uni-bremen.de. Windows users within the IUP-UB network can access the storage systems by typing \\hstoraether in the location bar of the Windows Explorer. There, the two shares \\hstoraether\beegfs and \\hstoraether\USERNAME are available. For technical reasons, the password is separate from the normal Aether login, as described in User accounts.

Access from Aether to other IUP-UB storage servers

The IUP-UB Hypathia storage oss server is mounted on the login nodes of Aether under /mnt/hypatia/oss.