Storage Guidelines HPC

Storage Types

Storage type	Where/Mount	Mount type	Purpose	Quota	Capacity
HOME	/[homes\|homes2]/[your_faculty\|extern]/[username]	network	Program application data; only small files (very precious data)	~ 2.5 GiB	-
WORK	/work/[username]	network	Permanent data storage; NO scratch files	NO	-
BeeGFS	/fast/[your_directories]	network	Scratch Storage of (very) large files	NO	-
Local Scratch	For batch jobs: $TMPDIR or optionally: /scratch/[your_directories]	node-local FS (shared by all jobs running on node)	Intermediary scratch storage for small and moderate-large files	NO	~ 200 - 500 GiB

BeeGFS (parallel distributed file system): preferred for large scratch files (starting from files sizes of a few hundreds of MiB) AND (semi-)permanent storage of scratch files
Node-local Scratch: fast, local FS storage for small to intermediary sized scratch files up to a size of few GiBs; big amounts of small scratch files should be written here (BeeGFS shows poor performance for files with sizes smaller than a few hundreds of MiB)

Please ensure, that your programs DO NOT write huge amounts of scratch files or data to your WORK (as this will block other users from getting their work done).
Please avoid (permanent) storage of un-needed scratch files and do not copy them to your WORK.
Please write your scratch files to node-local or BeeGFS (depends on size of the files; see section „Recommendations“). If needed, copy the program's checkpoint files from node-local scratch to BeeGFS.