Research Computing Dos and Don'ts
1 - Do Respect Your Storage Usage
The main storage location at "/home/yourusername" is located on a network storage device (NAS) and shared by every user in the department. The NAS has a large amount of space, but when you divide that by the number of total users, it can fill up quick. Please monitor your storage usage and delete unused data. Run the command below to view the size of your home directories. The larger your directory, the longer this command will take to run.
du -sh ~/.[!.]* | sort -hr2 - Don't Max Out the Server
Our servers are much more powerful than your laptop, but still can't handle running a dozen high output jobs at once. If you run too much on a single server, your session can become slow or even time out. Other users may not be able to connect to the server, rendering it useless for everyone until your jobs finish.
3 - Do Utilize Scratch Storage
Each Leviathan server is equipped with local SSD based storage at /scratch. This location provides faster access to your data and prevent's slow downs on the NAS. If you are loading data into a job, move the data to /scratch before hand. If you are writing out data, save it to /scratch. Once the job is complete, you can move the data back to your /home directory. Be sure to clean up data that is not in use to save space. More information on scratch storage can be found here.
