Storage

The launch of Barbora NG is planned for August 2026.
In the meantime, the first computational resources have already been allocated in the latest Open Access Grant Competition.

Barbora NG provides two main shared filesystems, HOME filesystem and SCRATCH filesystem, and has access to IT4Innovations’ central PROJECT storage, as well. All login and compute nodes may access the same data on shared file systems. Compute nodes are also equipped with local (non-shared) scratch, RAM disk, and TMP file systems.

Archiving

Do not use shared filesystems as a backup for large amount of data or long-term archiving mean. The academic staff and students of research institutions in the Czech Republic can use CESNET storage service, which is available via SSHFS.

HOME File System

The HOME filesystem is based on the Huawei architecture and the Dorado 3000 v6 platform. This filesystem contains users’ home directories /home/username. Accessible capacity is 25 TB, shared among all users. Individual users are restricted by filesystem usage quotas, set to 25 GB per user. Should it prove insufficient, contact support, the quota may be increased upon request.

The files on HOME filesystem will not be deleted until the end of the user’s lifecycle.

The filesystem is backed up, so that it can be restored in case of a catastrophic failure resulting in significant data loss. However, this backup is not intended to restore old versions of user data or to restore deleted files.

SCRATCH File System

The SCRATCH filesystem is realized as a DPC filesystem. The SCRATCH filesystem is mounted in the /scratch/project/PROJECT_ID directory created automatically with the PROJECT_ID project. Accessible capacity is 500TB, shared among all users, and available from all login and computational nodes. Individual users are restricted by filesystem usage quotas, set to 10TB per user. The purpose of this quota is to prevent runaway programs from filling the entire filesystem and deny service to other users. Should 10TB prove insufficient, contact support, the quota may be lifted upon request.

Users are advised to save the necessary data from the SCRATCH filesystem to HOME filesystem after the calculations and clean up the scratch files.

PROJECT File System

The PROJECT data storage is a central storage for projects’/users’ data on IT4Innovations that is accessible from all clusters. For more information, see the PROJECT storage section.

Local Filesystems

Each node is equipped with RAMDISK storage accessible at /lscratch and /ramdisk. Data placed on RAMDISK occupies the node RAM memory of 768GB total. The RAMDISK directory should only be used to work with temporary files, where very high throughput or I/O performance is required. Old files in RAMDISK directory are automatically purged with job’s end.

Summary