BeeGFS Tips¶

The BeeGFS storage is spread across 3 nodes with SSD disks. The aggregate storage is 100TB. We don't enforce quotas here as some projects have large storage needs. However, you do need to be a good HPC citizen and respect the rights of others. Don't needlessly fill up this storage.

We regularly delete all data here every 3-6 months. We only post warnings on the slack channel. If after 3 months the storage is not full and still performning well, we delay the wipe another 3 months.

This storage is not backed up at all. It is on a raid array so if a hard drive fails your data is safe. However in the event of a more dramatic hardware failure, earthquakes or fire - your data is gone forever. If you accidentally delete something, it's gone forever. If an Admin misconfigures something, your data is gone (we try not to do this!).

It is your responsiblilty to backup your data here - a good place is to use Digital Solutions Research Storage.

BeeGFS should have better IO performance than the scratch storage - however it does depend what other users are doing. No filesystem likes small files, BeeGFS likes small files even less than scratch. Filesizes over 1MB are best. If you have a large amount of files you can improve performance by splitting your files accross many directories - the load balancing accross the metadata and storage servers is by directory, not file.