KU Leuven storageΒΆ

The storage is organized according to the VSC storage guidelines

Variable

Type

Access

Backup

Default quota

$VSC_HOME

NFS

VSC

YES

3 GB

$VSC_DATA

NFS

VSC

YES

75 GB

$VSC_SCRATCH $VSC_SCRATCH_SITE

Lustre

genius

NO

500 GB

$VSC_SCRATCH_NODE

ext4

genius, job only

NO

200 GB

$VSC_SCRATCH_JOB

BeeGFS

genius, job only

NO

variable

$VSC_SCRATCH at KU Leuven is not a permament storage. The files older than 28 days are cleaned regularly. To be more specific, the automatic file removal is based on the moment a file was accessed for the last time. The reasoning behind this is that as long as you are actively using a file (so accessing it) , the file will not be removed. This policy can however cause confusion when files are initially transferred to a scratch directory. If you use for instance the mv command, the file is not actually accessed. As a result, if the last access timestamp of the original file is a long time in the past, the file on scratch will be considered to be inactive and automatically removed. A similar thing happens when using rsync with the option to preserve timestamps. Also Midnight Commander will always preserve timestamps when copying or moving data. To avoid this problem, the cp command (without -a argument) should be used for the initial transfer of files to a scratch directory.

For users from other universities, the quota on $VSC_HOME and $VSC_DATA will be determined by the local policy of your home institution as these file systems are mounted from there. The path names will be similar with trivial modifications based on your home institution and VSC account number.

Variable

Name

$VSC_HOME

/user/leuven/30X/vsc30XYZ

$VSC_DATA

/data/leuven/30X/vsc30XYZ

$VSC_SCRATCH $VSC_SCRATCH_SITE

/scratch/leuven/30X/vsc30XYZ

$VSC_SCRATCH_NODE

/local_scratch

The $VSC_HOME and $VSC_DATA file systems have snapshots, so it is possible to recover data that was accidentally deleted or modified. You can retrieve data by restoring a snapshot.

On genius, a BeeGFS file system can be created during the run of a job, for details, see the page on using BeeGFS for details.