File Systems

Each project can request a quota on each of the shared resources, and the path for that project is based upon the project name:

/work/projectA  --  limited size, user managed area, NOT backed up
/cache/projectA  --  write-thru cache to tape with auto-removal of the disk copy as needed
/volatile/projectA  --  auto-managed scratch space (never full)

If one of these does not exist, you may request a new quota; if your quota is too small, you may request a larger quota (limited by the remaining available space). Quotas are oversubscribed, so projects cannot all use their full quota concurrently.  Quotas and current usage can be viewed through the portal.

The quotas for /work use the ZFS file system.  The other two systems, implemented above Lustre, behave in a similar way to ZFS through periodically running processes that enforce quotas.  There are two types of thresholds within the quota systems:

reserved  -- this is not oversubscribed, and so you will always have at least this much space available to your project
quota -- this is a hard limit for /work, and a soft limit for /cache and /volatile; a write to /cache or /volatile will always succeed, but afterwards, older files will be deleted if you are over your quota, enforced by the in-house processes a few times a day