Storage quota

Viking is a self-contained machine, therefore you will notice your normal UoY home directories are not available. This is intentional for the following reasons:

If the dedicated network link between campus and Viking goes down, it may cause slowness or jobs to fail. Instead, jobs should continue to run until the link is re-established
If a user tries to read/write from the University filestores using Viking, it is possible that they could bring the entire storage system down for the University
UoY home directories are not designed for high-performance computing. Instead Viking has its own filesystem designed for high-performance

Your area on Viking explained

When you log in to Viking, you will land in your home directory, specifically:

/users/abc123

Where abc123 will be replaced by your username. This home directory has a size of 100GB and a file limit of 400,000. From within the home directory, you can access your scratch directory, which is a special high-performance filestore with a default size of 2TB and no limit on the number of files.

/mnt/scratch/users/abc123/

Tip

If you need more scratch storage space, please email us at itsupport@york.ac.uk, we are more than happy to accommodate large projects.

Additionally you also have access to a localtmp folder which points to storage space on the current node which you are logged into, on fast SSD drives. It’s also an area which is not backed up so should only be used for processing data whilst it’s in use, after which the data should be backed up or archived if needed. You can access this directory at:

/users/abc123/localtmp

Checking your quota

To check how much space you have left, run the following command:

$ myquota

Which will produce something similar to the following result where you can see your scratch quota, your home folder quota (/users/abc123), and now also your Longship quota:

Scratch quota:
Disk quotas for usr abc123 (uid 12345):
     Filesystem    used   quota   limit   grace   files   quota   limit   grace
   /mnt/scratch      4k      2T    2.1T       -       1       0       0       -
uid 12345 is using default block quota setting
uid 12345 is using default file quota setting

Home quota:
Disk quotas for user abc123 (uid 12345):
     Filesystem   space   quota   limit   grace   files   quota   limit   grace
10.10.0.15:/export/users
                   220K    100G    110G              53    400k    500k
longship.york.ac.uk:/users
                     0K      0K   2048G               1       0       0

What happens if you exceed your quota

When you login to Viking you will be told if you are over quota. If this is in users area with the 100GB or 400,000 files limit you will need to delete or move your files to your scratch area. There is a grace period of 7 days after which you will lose access to Viking.

If you are over quota in the scratch area and need more space please email itsupport@york.ac.uk where we can increase your quota. There is a grace period of 7 days after which you will lose access to Viking.

Tip

If you receive a warning that you have exceeded the 400,000 file limit in your home directory and would like a summary of where all the files are located, try this command:

cd ~ && ls -1d */ .*/ | grep -vE 'scratch|\./|\.\./' | xargs du --inodes -s

This should provide a breakdown of the number of files (technically, file descriptors, also known as inodes) by (top level) directory. If you don’t mind waiting for all the results to be sorted try the folllowing command:

cd ~ && ls -1d */ .*/ | grep -vE 'scratch|\./|\.\./' | xargs du --inodes -s | sort -n

Transferring file to and from Viking or backing up

Please see the DATA MANAGEMENT section with links to various locations and methods to transfer data to a from Viking for more information.