Editing CU Research Computing (section)

= Don't save temporary files in /work/KellerLab =
Everything you save to /work/KellerLab is backed up automatically by the system. This is generally good, unless you're saving files that you only need for the moment, or at most for a few days. We don't need these files long term and we don't need them backed up, but they will be backed up, and '''they'll count against our total storage allocation for the next year'''. The last thing we want is to pay for storage for a bunch of large temporary files that are also backed up.

If the temporary files are deleted by you after they're automatically backed up, they live on for a year before they're finally removed entirely from the system. That's one year of paying for storage for unneeded files.

Fortunately, RC has a solution for this, called ''scratch''' space. Scratch space is meant for temporary files that do not need to be backed up. Scratch space has several advantages, including:
* Scratch is faster faster
* Scratch is not backed up (this can be a good thing!)
* We don't have to pay for scratch

'''So unless you know the file you're creating is important to save long-term, use the scratch space.'''

When using '''janus''' nodes scratch data should be written to
<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">
/lustre/janus_scratch/<username> # or
/rc_scratch/<username>
</syntaxhighlight>

When using '''himem''' aka '''blanca-ibg''', scratch data can be written to
<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">
/lustre/janus_scratch/<username> # or
/rc_scratch/<username>           # or
/local/scratch/<username> 
</syntaxhighlight>

When using '''blanca-ibgc1''' scratch can be written to
<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">
/rc_scratch/<username>  # or
/local/scratch/<username>
</syntaxhighlight>

You will have to manually create a directory to put their stuff in. You can also just make a big mess with files all over and annoy other users. lustre and rc_scratch are network filesystems, and will appear identical on all nodes that connect to them. /local/scratch is local to the particular node used, so something saved on bnode0108 will not be visible from himem04. The size of /local/scratch depends on which node is used, but it is about not large. The "df" command does not work on rc_scratch, so it's unclear how much space is available. In the future lustre will be going away, and will probably be replaced by rc_scratch.