3/28/16: GPFS back in production

We will be putting the GPFS scratch filesystem back into production today.  The $GLOBAL_SCRATCH environment variable will be changed to point back to /gpfs/scratch

 

What does that mean for you?


  • Running jobs using /ifs/scratch will continue to write to that directory

  • Pending (queued) jobs utilizing the GLOBAL_SCRATCH environment variable will write to /gpfs/scratch when the job starts.  Make sure you create your directory in /gpfs/scratch before your job starts!

  • If you are not using the GLOBAL_SCRATCH environment variable (you should be!) – you will need to change your SLURM scripts to write to /gpfs/scratch instead of /ifs/scratch

 

The files in /ifs/scratch will be available for a few weeks for you to copy them to /gpfs/scratch.  However, as of the April 5th downtime, /ifs/scratch will not be writeable so any jobs trying to write there will fail.  It is advantageous for you to switch back to /gpfs/scratch as soon as possible.  It is much faster and the less we use IFS for scratch purposes, the better the response time will be on our home and project directories.

 

If you have any questions about this change, please email ccr-help@buffalo.edu or submit a ticket through our help portal:  https://ubccr.freshdesk.com