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File Systems on Phoenix

Contents

• Home Directory
• Work Space
• High-Performance Storage System (HPSS)

Home Directory

User home directories as well as some system directories are located in a Network File Service (NFS) that is accessible from Phoenix.

Because the NFS servers are outside Phoenix, NFS does not provide the highest performance. For fast file access on Phoenix, see "Work Space", below.

Each user has a default storage limit of 500 MB in their home directory. In addition to the ".yesterday" backup described below, home directories in NFS are copied to tape backup four times a week.

To find your quota and usage in NFS, use the following command

$ lsquota ~
Fileset Name          Quota    Used  Used   Aggregate
us.user               500000  407726    81%    89% = 22865076/25574421
(LFS)

Each home directory has a default set of subdirectories:

public	This directory is world readable. Use it to make files available to other CCS users.
private	This directory is only accessible by the user.
.yesterday	This directory contains a read-only copy of all the rest of the home directory, including other subdirectories, as of the day before. The copy is generated at 4AM each morning. If you accidentally delete any of your NFS files, you can simply copy versions from the day before out of ".yesterday". You cannot directly create or remove files from the ".yesterday" directory.
bin	This directory is a location for user-generated executables. It is not in your "PATH" by default, however. You can add it or one if its subdirectories to your "PATH" in your ".profile" or ".cshrc" file.
www	Documents kept in this directory are available over the World-Wide Web provided the permissions allow readability. These files can be accessed from "http://www.ccs.ornl.gov/~user".

Work Space

Local work space is available on Phoenix for temporary files and for staging large files from and to HPSS. The space is not backed up, and it is purged to help ensure that adequate work space is available for new jobs. Files that have not been accessed for more than a week are considered eligible for purging.

Each Phoenix user has a separate directory in the work space:

/tmp/work/$USER

The path "/tmp/work/$USER" is available on all CCS systems, but it points to a different filesystem on each system. Each one is local to that respective system.

Do not create files directly in the "/tmp" directory! "/tmp/work/$USER" is actually a symbolic link to a completely different filesystem (like "/scratch/scr4tb/$USER"). The "/tmp" filesystem itself is quite small, and, when /tmp fills up, system problems result.

High-Performance Storage System

The High-Performance Storage System (HPSS) provides archival storage. It is "high performance" relative to other archival systems, not relative to native file systems. Large permanent files should be moved directly from "/tmp/work/$USER", presumably where they were created, to HPSS.

You access HPSS through the "hsi" and "htar" interfaces. The CCS is moving to one-time passwords (OTPs) for authentication. Once this occurs, "hsi" will require an OTP for each connection, so it will not work within batch scripts. Please contact "consult@ccs.ornl.gov" if you need password-free access to "hsi" on Phoenix.

For more information on HPSS and "hsi", type "hsi help" on Phoenix or see the online documentation, available at the following URL.

http://www.ccs.ornl.gov/Storage/hsi_docs/

For more information on "htar", see "man htar" on Phoenix or see the online documentation, available at the following URL.

http://www.ccs.ornl.gov/Storage/htar

HPSS is unavailable during weekly maintenance, which occurs Wednesday mornings, typically 7AM-10AM.