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Policy

A brief description of each area and basic guidelines to follow are provided in the table below:

Area	Path	Enclave	Type	Permissions	Quota	Backups	Purged	Retention	On Compute Nodes
User Home	/ccs/home/[userid]	O, M1,2	NFS	User set	50 GB	Yes	No	90 days	Read-only
User Archive [1]	/home/[userid]	O, M1	HPSS	User set	2TB	No	No	90 days	No
User Archive [2]	/home/[userid]	O, M1	HPSS	700	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	No
Project Home	/ccs/proj/[projid]	O, M1,2	NFS	770	50 GB	Yes	No	90 days	Read-only
Member Work	/gpfs/alpine/[projid]/scratch/[userid]	M1,2	Spectrum Scale	700 [3]	50 TB	No	90 days	N/A [4]	Read/Write
Project Work	/gpfs/alpine/[projid]/proj-shared	M1,2	Spectrum Scale	770	50 TB	No	90 days	N/A [4]	Read/Write
World Work	/gpfs/alpine/[projid]/world-shared	M1	Spectrum Scale	775	50 TB	No	90 days	N/A [4]	Read/Write
Open Member Work	/gpfs/wolf/[projid]/scratch/[userid]	Open	Spectrum Scale	700 [3]	50 TB	No	90 days	N/A [4]	Read/Write
Open Project Work	/gpfs/wolf/[projid]/proj-shared	Open	Spectrum Scale	770	50 TB	No	90 days	N/A [4]	Read/Write
Open World Work	/gpfs/wolf/[projid]/world-shared	Open	Spectrum Scale	775	50 TB	No	90 days	N/A [4]	Read/Write
Member Archive	/hpss/prod/[projid]/users/$USER	M1	HPSS	700	100 TB	No	No	90 days	No
Project Archive	/hpss/prod/[projid]/proj-shared	M1	HPSS	770	100 TB	No	No	90 days	No
World Archive	/hpss/prod/[projid]/world-shared	M1	HPSS	775	100 TB	No	No	90 days	No
Moderate Enhanced User Home	/gpfs/arx/[projid]/home/[userid]	ME	Spectrum Scale	700	50 TB	No	90 days	N/A [4]	Read/Write
Moderate Enhanced Member Work	/gpfs/arx/[projid]/scratch/[userid]	ME	Spectrum Scale	700	50 TB	No	90 days	N/A [4]	Read/Write
Moderate Enhanced Project Work	/gpfs/arx/[projid]/proj-shared/[userid]	ME	Spectrum Scale	770	50 TB	No	90 days	N/A [4]	Read/Write

Area - The general name of the storage area.

Path - The path (symlink) to the storage area’s directory.

Enclave - The security enclave where the path is available. There are several security enclaves:

- Open (O) - Ascent and other OLCF machines accessible with a username/password

- Moderate Projects not subject to export control (M1) - These are projects on machines such as Summit or Andes that require 2-factor authentication but are not subject to export controll restrictions.

- Moderate Projects subject to export control (M2) - Same as M1, but projects that are subject to export control restrictions.

- Moderated Enhanced (ME) - These are projects that might involve HIPAA or ITAR regulations. These projects utilize Summit compute resources but have extra security precautions and separate file systems.

Type - The underlying software technology supporting the storage area.

Permissions - UNIX Permissions enforced on the storage area’s top-level directory.

Quota - The limits placed on total number of bytes and/or files in the storage area.

Backups - States if the data is automatically duplicated for disaster recovery purposes.

Purged - Period of time, post-file-access, after which a file will be marked as eligible for permanent deletion.

Retention - Period of time, post-account-deactivation or post-project-end, after which data will be marked as eligible for permanent deletion.

On Compute Nodes - Is this filesystem available on compute nodes (no, available but read-only, and available read/write)

Important

Files within “Work” directories (i.e., Member Work, Project Work, World Work) are not backed up and are purged on a regular basis according to the timeframes listed above.

Tip

If your home directory reaches its quota, your batch jobs might fail with the error cat: write error: Disk quota exceeded. This error may not be intuitive, especially if your job exclusively uses work areas that are well under quota. The error is actually related to your home directory quota. Sometimes, batch systems write temporary files to the home directory (for example, on Summit LSF writes temporary data in ~/.lsbatch), so if the home directory is over quota and that file creation fails, the job will fail with the quota error.

You can check your home directory quota with the quota command. If it is over quota, you need to bring usage under the quota and then your jobs should run without encountering the Disk quota exceeded error.

Footnotes

[1]	This entry is for legacy User Archive directories which contained user data on January 14, 2020.

[2]	User Archive directories that were created (or had no user data) after January 14, 2020. Settings other than permissions are not applicable because directories are root-owned and contain no user files.

[3]

(1, 2) Permissions on Member Work directories can be controlled to an extent by project members. By default, only the project member has any accesses, but accesses can be granted to other project members by setting group permissions accordingly on the Member Work directory. The parent directory of the Member Work directory prevents accesses by “UNIX-others” and cannot be changed (security measures).

[4]	(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) Retention is not applicable as files will follow purge cycle.

On Summit, Andes, and the DTNs, additional paths to the various project-centric work areas are available via the following symbolic links and/or environment variables:

• Member Work Directory: /gpfs/alpine/scratch/[userid]/[projid] or $MEMBERWORK/[projid]
• Project Work Directory: /gpfs/alpine/proj-shared/[projid] or $PROJWORK/[projid]
• World Work Directory: /gpfs/alpine/world-shared/[projid] or $WORLDWORK/[projid]

Information

Although there are no hard quota limits for the project storage, an upper storage limit should be reported in the project request. The available space of a project can be modified upon request.

Purge

To keep the Spectrum Scale file system exceptionally performant, files that have not been accessed in the project and user areas are purged at the intervals shown in the table above. Please make sure that valuable data is moved off of these systems regularly. See HPSS Data Archival System. for information about using the HSI and HTAR utilities to archive data on HPSS. Just to note that when you read a file, then the 90 days counter restarts.

Special Requests

If you need an exception to the limits listed in the table above, such as a higher quota in your User/Project Home or a purge exemption in a Member/Project/World Work area, contact help@olcf.ornl.gov with a summary of the exception that you need.

Data Retention

By default, the OLCF does not guarantee lifetime data retention on any OLCF resources. Following a user account deactivation or project end, user and project data in non-purged areas will be retained for 90 days. After this timeframe, the OLCF retains the right to delete data. Data in purged areas remains subject to normal purge policies.