Beartooth Filesystem

Overview:

Beartooth uses the Teton Creek parallel filesystem configured with a 190 TB SSD tier for active data and 1.2 PB HDD capacity tier for less-used data. The system policy engine moves data automatically between pools (disks and tiers). The system will automatically migrate data down to HDD based on file age. Beartooth has several spaces that are available for users to access described in the table below.

home/home/username ($HOME)

• Space for configuration files and software installations. This file space is intended to be small and always resides on SSDs. The /home file space is snapshotted to recover from accidental deletions.

project/project/project_name/[username]

• Space to collaborate among project members. Data here is persistent and is exempt from purge policy. The /project file space is snapshotted to recover from accidental deletions.

gscratch - /gscratch/username ($SCRATCH)

• Space to perform computing for individual users. Data here is subject to a purge policy defined below. Warning emails will be sent when possible deletions may start to occur. No snapshots.

Global Filesystems

Snapshots vs Backups

Snapshots are a point in time reference of a specific filesystem, that can be referenced after changes are made. The data stays on the same storage system. This data would not be recoverable if there is an issue with the storage system.

Backups are the act of transporting data to another storage system for safe-keeping, recoverable if an issue occurs with the source file system.

Purge Policy

• File spaces within the Beartooth cluster filesystem may be subject to a purge policy. ARCC reserves the right to purge data in this area after 30 to 90 days of no access or from creation time. Before performing an actual purge event, the owner of the file(s) will be notified by email several times for files that are subject to being purged.

• Additional information summarizing ARCC’s storage policy is available here.

Storage Increases on Beartooth

Special Filesystems

Certain filesystems exist on different nodes of the cluster where specialized requirements exist. The table below summarizes these specialized filesystems.

Specialty Filesystems

The node-local scratch or lscratch filesystem is purged at the end of each job.

The memory filesystems can really enhance the performance of small I/O operations. If you have a localized single node I/O jobs that have very intensive random access patterns, this filesystem may improve the performance of your compute job.

The Alcova filesystems are only available from the login nodes, not on the compute nodes. Storage space on the Beartooth global filesystems does not imply storage space on the ARCC petaLibrary or vice versa. For more information about Alcova please see: Alcova archived