File systems are configured for different purposes. Each machine has access to at least three different file systems with different levels of performance, permanence and available space.
See quotas for detailed information about inode, space quotas and file system purge policies.
Permanent, relatively small storage for data like source code, shell scripts that you want to keep. This file system is not tuned for high performance for parallel jobs. Referenced by the environment variable
A performant platform to install software stacks and compile code. Mounted read-only on compute nodes.
Large, permanent, medium-performance file system. Project directories are intended for sharing data within a group of researchers.
A high capacity tape archive intended for long term storage of inactive and important data. Accessible from all systems at NERSC. Space quotas are allocation dependent
The High Performance Storage System (HPSS) is a modern, flexible, performance-oriented mass storage system. It has been used at NERSC for archival storage since 1998. HPSS is intended for long term storage of data that is not frequently accessed.
Cori has a dedicated, large, local, parallel scratch file system based on Lustre. The scratch file system is intended for temporary uses such as storage of checkpoints or application input and output.
Cori's Burst Buffer provides very high performance I/O on a per-job or short-term basis. It is particularly useful for codes that are I/O-bound, for example, codes that produce large checkpoint files, or that have small or random I/O reads/writes.