Managing your data on RRA

This page will provide guidelines for managing your data effectively on RRA. Since we have various storage locations available as well as differing rules for how those storage locations are managed, its good to have an idea of what you should do to ensure your data is on the best location depending on your requirements.

Guidelines for Running Jobs

1. Use /work (as opposed to your /home directory) as your storage location for running jobs. Do not use your /home directory for running jobs on the cluster.

2. Move data that you would like to keep to /home or /shares, as /work is not backed up, is not redundant, and files older than 6 months could be purged. You do not want to lose important data, so do not use /work for permanent storage!

3. Compress results that you would like to store permanently! There is no reason not to do this and it helps you to keep you under your quota, allowing you to store more results. See Data Storage and Archiving for more info.

Running Jobs Example

Typically, jobs should be run from a staging directory under /work. This can be accomplished by creating a directory under /work for your job input files and resulting output. We’ll show an example below using /work:

1. Create the directory:

[user@rra-login0 ~]$ mkdir $WORK/myjob

 

2. Put your input files inside the directory:

[user@rra-login0 ~]$ cp INPUT1 INPUT2 INPUT3 $WORK/myjob

 

3. Next, lets change to our job directory:

[user@rra-login0 ~]$ cd $WORK/myjob

 

4. Let’s next create our submit script, and then run the job. We’ll be running myapp against the input files in this directory, so lets create a submit script (named myjob.sh), with the following contents:

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --job-name=myjob
#SBATCH --time=10:00:00
#SBATCH --ntasks=16
#SBATCH --output=output.%j.myjob
#SBATCH --qos=rra
#SBATCH --partition=rra

module add apps/myapp/1.0

myapp < INPUT*

 

5.Then, we can submit the job to the SLURM scheduler:

[user@rra-login0 myjob]$ sbatch ./myjob.sh

 

6. After we run and the job completes, there should be output as well:

[user@rra-login0 myjob]$ ls
INPUT1 INPUT2 INPUT3 OUTPUT1 OUTPUT2 OUTPUT3 output.45698.myjob

 

7. Let’s do some post-processing and review our data while its on /work:

[user@rra-login0 myjob]$ 

 

8. Good. we have what we need, but we should store our calculation somewhere safe to recall later. We’ll put the directory in a compressed archive in our /home directory where it will be backed up and kept safe:

[user@rra-login0 myjob]$ pushd ..; tar -czvf $HOME/myjob.tar.gz myjob; popd
...

 

9. Let’s go ahead and remove the job directory from /work to keep our disk utilization low:

[user@rra-login0 myjob]$ cd
[user@rra-login0 ~]$ rm -rf $WORK/myjob

 

Checking Your Disk Space/File Count Quotas

You can check your quota via use of the rra-myquota command.

[user@rra-login0 ~]$ rra-myquota

RC Filesystem Current Quota Utilization:
Date: Sat Nov  5 16:37:53 EDT 1955


Filesystem  Space Used  Space Quota  File Count  File Count Quota
/home       27.97 GiB   200.00 GiB   143598      409600            
/work       662.07 GiB  2.00 TiB     9025        146620            


For more information about the data above, please refer to the manual page using the command:  man rra-myquota