Alliance Canada files and quotas

This information is specific to the cluster fir.alliancecan.ca that we use.

Alliance Canada Filespace

The filespace on fir.alliancecan.ca is comprised of three separate disks named /home, /project, and /scratch. Each disk is organized to host separate users.
When you log in to fir.alliancecan.ca as user <user> you will be in the /home/<user> directory.
When you list the contents of /home/<user> you will see project and scratch, which are “softlinks”, or short-cuts. Changing directory (cd) to these will take you to /project/def-<sponsor>, your group’s project directory (a communal space for the group of your account sponsor <sponsor>) and /scratch/<user>, your personal scratch directory.
- Aside: When you list the contents of /home/<user> you will also see a projects (plural) directory and a nearline directory. Ignore these for now; projects is only useful for people who work with multiple sponsors and nearline is for archival storage, which we haven’t been using.
Files you put in /home and /project stay until you delete them, but files in /scratch are automatically deleted by the system about once a month.

Purpose of each disk

Roughly speaking

/home is for code and other files that you work with but don’t need to share with anyone.
- Note: You should plan to share everything you do that leads to research output, such as a thesis or a paper. Fully reproducible research is a basic requirement of open science.
/project is for files that need to be stored long-term and shared with others.
- Scripts and data needed to reproduce your research findings should go here.
/scratch is where you will do most of your computing.
- Copy scripts and data needed for your jobs from /home or /project to your /scratch/<user> directory (or a sub-directory) and submit your job scripts from there.
- Output files will end up in the same directory you run from.
- After the job finishes, copy any output you need back to /project or /home, depending on whether or not they’re to be shared, respectively. (See Copying to /project below for tips on copying.)

Disk quotas

You have quotas on each disk.
On /home you have 50GB, on /project you have 2GB and on /scratch you have 20TB.
In addition to your personal 2GB quota on /project, your sponsor (jgraham or mcneney) has a 1TB /project quota.
Files count towards quotas according to (i) which disk they are on and (ii) which “group owner” they have (see the Unix groups section below for information on Unix groups).
Files in /home/<user> and /scratch/<user> should always have group ownership <user> and will count towards the user’s quota on those disks.
Files in /project with group ownership <user> count towards the user’s 2GB personal /project quota, files in /project with group ownership def-jgraham count towards Jinko’s 1TB /project quota and files in /project with group ownership def-mcneney count towards Brad’s 1TB /project quota.
Important: As far as quotas on /project go, it doesn’t matter where a file is, only its group ownership. For example, if Jinko gives Brad permission to write files to /project/def-jgraham/ and he moves a file there that has group ownership def-mcneney, the file counts against his def-mcneney /project quota, not Jinko’s.

Copying files to/from `/project`

Be careful about using the Unix mv command to copy files you own to /project. Since mv preserves file ownership, using it to move a file you own to the communal /project directory will mean that the file counts against your 2GB <user> quota rather than the communal 1TB quota of def-<sponsor>.
Instead, use cp to copy directories and files into the communal /project space.
For example, say you want to copy TestDir from your /scratch/<user> directory to /project/def-jgraham/share. First change directory to /scratch/<user> and then type cp -r TestDir /project/def-jgraham/share/. (The -r is to recursively copy sub-directories.)
The copy of TestDir in /project/def-jgraham/shares/ will automatically have group ownership def-jgraham.
If you won’t need TestDir in your scratch directory any more, remove it by typing rm -r TestDir.

The group communal space in /project is good for sharing files between sponsored users of the same project, but not between different projects.
Since project members of def-jgraham and def-mcneney frequently share data,
we’ve set up a data-sharing group of Share, sfu-statgen.
The place to share files between groups is /project/def-mcneney/share.
Use cp to copy directories and files to an appropriate sub-directory of the share space.
By default, the directories and files you copy to the Share /project/def-mcneney/share will have group ownership def-mcneney, but nobody but you will be able to read, write and execute them.
To allow other users to read, write and execute the files you copy into the Share, you need to take two more steps.
Suppose you copied the directory TestDir into /project/def-mcneney/share. Change to this directory in the Share and execute the following two commands
```
setfacl -d -m g:sfu-statgen:rwx TestDir
```
```
setfacl -R -m g:sfu-statgen:rwX TestDir
```

(note the capital X in the second setfacl command). Other members of the sfu-statgen data-sharing group can now work with TestDir and its contents as if they were their own.

Unix groups

On Unix, directories and files have two levels of ownership, the “user” (the user who created it) and the “group” (the Unix group that the user belongs to). You can see the ownership of files using ls -la. For example, here is an excerpt of the listing of some of the sub-directories of the /project/def-jgraham directory. We are interested in the third and fourth columns of output.

drwx--S---    9 epasiedn def-jgraham   4096 Nov 17 06:58 epasiedn
drwx--S---    2 jgraham  def-jgraham   4096 Mar 17  2021 jgraham

For the first sub-directory, the user owner is epasiedn and the group owner is def-jgraham. For the second sub-directory, the user owner is jgraham and the group owner is def-jgraham. Since the group owner is def-jgraham for both directories, both count against the communal quota of the def-jgraham project.

As another example, here is a partial listing of some of the sub-directories of /home/jgraham:

drwxr-x---      5 jgraham jgraham        4096 Mar 11  2021 msprime_env
drwxr-xr-x      2 root    jgraham        4096 May 15  2019 nearline

For the first sub-directory, the user owner and group owner are both jgraham. For the second sub-directory, the user owner is root (the super-user) and the group owner is jgraham. We can see that the second sub-directory was created by root but counts toward jgraham’s 50GB personal quota on /home.