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There are two primary filesystem locations on the Mill of interest to new users, commonly referred to as home and scratch.
| Storage Type |
Location |
Quota |
Description |
| Home |
/home/{username} |
50 GB |
Available to all users |
| Scratch |
/mnt/stor/scratch/(username} |
Large |
Available to all users |
| Ceph |
/mnt/stor/ceph/{username} |
Varies |
For investment, cluster attached |
| VAST |
/share/vast/{share_name} |
Varies |
For investment, cluster attached |
Home
Home is the default location where your terminal will land after logging into the Mill via ssh. Its path is /home/{username}. Home can also be referenced by the path shortcut ~ . By default, all users have 50 GB of storage space in their home directory. This storage is not backed up, so please do not treat your home directory as a permanent data storage solution. You will be warned that you are above your quota at 50 GB but you running job will be allowed to finish. At 60 GB, you will be warned that you are above your storage quota and your job will not be allowed to write anymore data. This will likely crash your job. New jobs will not be able to start when above either quota. More storage is available to purchase - details below.
To check your quota, we provide the quota tool. In a terminal, the command quota -s will output your current use and your quota in MB (50GB=50,000MB).
In this example, I am using 23GB (23038MB) of my 50GB (51200MB) quota and the hard limit at which my jobs will be prevented from writing to disk.
Scratch
The Mill has a large amount of scratch space that is available for use. It can be accessed at /mnt/stor/scratch/{username} . Scratch has a much larger storage limit. The design intent for scratch is to be used for transient data that is needed during computation. When your job has finished you are expected to clean up and delete your own data from scratch. In the event that scratch becomes full, cluster staff will warn users who are not cleaning up after themselves and delete old data from scratch to make room.
Leased Storage
Two forms of leased storage are available for purchase. Pricing details can be found on the Mill Pricing Model page.
Ceph is HDD based and provides a good compromise between cost and performance. If you lab has leased storage it can be found at /mnt/stor/ceph/{share_name}.
VAST is SSD based and provides better performance for I/O heavy workflows that need large datasets. It can be found at /share/vast/{share_name}.