KU Leuven storage#

The storage is organized according to the VSC storage guidelines

File systems#

Variable

Type

Access

Backup

Default quota

$VSC_HOME

NFS

VSC

YES

3 GB

$VSC_DATA

NFS

VSC

YES

75 GB

$VSC_SCRATCH

Lustre

Genius & wICE

NO

500 GB

$VSC_SCRATCH_SITE

Genius & wICE

NO

500 GB

$VSC_SCRATCH_NODE

ext4

Genius

wICE

NO

200 GB

600 GB

$VSC_SCRATCH at KU Leuven is not a permanent storage. The files older than 30 days are cleaned up 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.

Environment variables#

The table below lists the path to different storages that KU Leuven users can by default access.

Variable

Path

$VSC_HOME

/user/leuven/3../vsc3….

$VSC_DATA

/data/leuven/3../vsc3….

$VSC_SCRATCH

/scratch/leuven/3../vsc3….

$VSC_SCRATCH_NODE

/local_scratch (Genius)

/tmp (wIce)

$VSC_SCRATCH_SITE

$VSC_SCRATCH

Note

All KU Leuven VSC accounts start with the digit 3. Also the dots . are wildcards that match single digits.

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 referring to restoring a snapshot.