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Quotas on RC filesystems

Home filesystem quotas

This applies only to the main-campus clusters.   The VIMS clusters are not effected.

Filesystem quotas enabled on the home filesystem.   A quota limits how total disk-space you can have in your home directory.  If you try to exceed your quota size in your home directory ("/sciclone/home/<user>"), you will see something like this:

[4 ewalter@comet ~ ]$pwd
/sciclone/home/ewalter
[5 ewalter@comet ~ ]$cp /sciclone/data10/ewalter/BIGFILE .     #copying BIGFILE from /sciclone/data10/ewalter to my current directory, /sciclone/home/ewalter
cp: error writing './BIGFILE': Disk quota exceeded

This means that I tried to exceed my home filesystem quota and the copy failed.   Any time you exceed your home filesystem quota, no more writing will be allowed and any command attempting to do this will fail (including output for SLURM/k8s jobs).

For most users, the main things to know are how to check quota usage, how to see what is taking space, and what to clean up if needed.

Note: all of the following must be performed after logging into comet.sciclone.wm.edu.

Quick reference

Check your quota:
quota -s

[1 ewalter@comet ~ ]$quota -s
Disk quotas for user ewalter (uid 1719): 
Filesystem space quota limit grace files quota limit grace
/dev/sdb1   353G  550G 550G        4350k     0     0

Explanation of outputs of quota -s command

Heading	Meaning
Filesystem	/dev/sdb1 is the home filesystem ("/sciclone/home")
space	the size of your /sciclone/home/<user> folder
quota	the max space you can store
limit	the max space you can store
grace	(not used) - since the quota is the same as the limit, there is no grace period
files	the number of files in your home directory

Check total space used in your home directory:
du -sh $HOME

See which top-level directories use the most space:
du -sh $HOME/* 2>/dev/null | sort -h

Include hidden files and directories too:
du -sh $HOME/.[!.]* $HOME/* 2>/dev/null | sort -h

Find files larger than 1 GB:
find $HOME -type f -size +1G -ls 2>/dev/null

Estimate how many files you have:
find $HOME -type f | wc -l

If you are over quota, you may see errors such as:

Disk quota exceeded
Cannot create file
Cannot write file
Job output could not be written

If this happens, common cleanup targets include:

• old Slurm output files
• large downloads
• tar or zip archives
• cache directories
• old Conda environments

Large datasets and temporary output should usually be stored in project, scratch, or other appropriate storage rather than in home.

Please send email to [[w|hpc-help]] if you need help.