CIRCE Layout

The following page will describe the system layout with details on where files and directories are stored.

CIRCE Login Nodes

When a user connects via SSH to circe.rc.usf.edu, they will end up on one of several login nodes. These are the redundant, load-balancing login nodes which will allow you to access your files, develop code, submit jobs, and review your data.

Storage

CIRCE has three tiers of storage, details below:

/home

/home is your primary storage location and the default location you are assigned when you log into the system.

• /home resides on a FibreChannel SAN
• Served by two NFS servers, for fail-over redundancy
• Continuously replicated to a second array
• Backed-up nightly with up to 14 days of snapshots

Home directories are laid out as follows:

/home/[a-z]/<netid>

where [a-z] is the first letter of the user’s NetID.

/shares

/shares contains folders for group collaboration. If you are a member of any groups or you create any groups, you will have a folder under /shares of the same name. /shares is

• Served by two NFS servers, for fail-over redundancy
• Continuously replicated to a second array
• Backed-up nightly with up to 14 days of snapshots

/work

/work is the storage space used when running jobs. Jobs will read and write files from /work as it is designed to be fast and responsive so as not to hold up calculations. /work is

• Based on a Lustre filesystem provided by Data-Direct Networks’ ExaScaler appliance
• NOT backed up in any way
• NOT replicated
• Regularly purged of files that have not been accessed within 6 months.

/apps

/apps contains most of the system’s third-party applications.

Clusters

CIRCE provides access to several compute cluster environments, some of which are accessible University-wide and others which are only accessible by certain research groups. Please see the queue layout documentation for more information.