I/O Recommendations

For your jobs to run efficiently at PDSF (see Job Efficiency) it's probably important for you to put some thought into how you do your I/O.  If your input files are not too large you could consider copying them to the scratch space of the batch node they run on as part of the job.  Scratch is local to each node and has excellent bandwidth but limited size, see Other Filesystems for more details.

Many PDSF users need to access datasets that are too large to be copied to scratch and instead do I/O on large shared filesystems (see Eliza Filesystems).  In this case it's important to use I/O resources, see I/O Resources.

A third possibility is to use disk space mounted locally on the batch nodes (/export/data) that is considerably larger than the scratch space.  However, this requires your group to have access (i.e., have purchased) such space and also provide the infrastructure to send your jobs to the node having the desired files.  Historically the STAR collaboration has used this method the most.