Merge of $WORK and $ARCHIVE

In order to simplify the storage mount points and the user experience in storing their data on the Jubail HPC, We have merged the functionalities of two storages, $WORK (/work/<NetID>) and $ARCHIVE (/archive/NetID>) into a single storage $ARCHIVE (/archive/<NetID>).

This section highlights the major changes which affect’s the user experience after the merge.

  1. Storage Mountpoints

  2. Functionality

  3. Archiving

Summary

Before

Now

Storage Mountpoints

The filesystems available for each user were as follows:

  • $HOME (/home/<NetID>)

  • $SCRATCH (/scratch/<NetID>)

  • $WORK (/work/<NetID>)

  • $ARCHIVE (/archive/<NetID>)

The filesystems available for each user is now:

  • $HOME (/home/<NetID>)

  • $SCRATCH (/scratch/<NetID>)

  • $ARCHIVE (/archive/<NetID>)

  • The /work/<NetID> has been discontinued from 2nd Feb 2023. The previous data in /work/<NetID> is moved to /archive/work/<NetID> as a temporary staging area to allow users to move out their existing data from $WORK to archive (/archive/<NetID>/…).

  • The /archive/work/<NetID> will be available for the users from the 3rd of Feb 2023 and would be deprecated after a period of 180 days.

Functionality

The basic funcionality of $WORK and $ARCHIVE were as follows:

  • $WORK: Additional form of storage for researchers which is also externally mountable on a local workstation/PC.

  • $ARCHIVE: A long term storage solution in the form of tape drives for data which isn’t frequently used.

  • The merging of two mountpoints ($ARCHIVE and $WORK ) into a single mountpoint ($ARCHIVE) incorporates the functionalities of both and hence reducing the complexity at the user end.

  • The new $ARCHIVE acts as a from of storage that can be externally mounted to local workstation/PC and acts as a solution for long term storage as well.

Accessing $ARCHIVE

$ARCHIVE was inaccessible using the general unix commands (cd , cp , mv etc) and was accessible only using the dmf commands (dmfls , dmfput , dmfget etc).

Users can move their files directly to archive using the traditional unix commands (cp , mv etc) instead of the earlier dmf commands (dmfput,dmfget etc) which are still available.

Users would also be able to navigate through their /archive/<NetID> directory unlike earlier.

More details on the commands for $ARCHIVE can be found here