Under the Framework for time-critical applications Member States can run ecFlow suites monitored by ECMWF. Known as the option 2 within that framework, they enjoy a special technical setup to maximise the robustness and high availability similar to ECMWF's own operational production. When moving from a standard user account to a time-critical one (typically starting with a "z"followed by two or three characters) there are a number of things you must be aware of:.
Table of Contents
Special filesystems
...
Time critical option 2 users, or zids, have a special set of filesystems different from the regular user. They are served from different storage servers in different computing halls, and are not kept in sync automatically. It is the user's responsibility to ensure the required files and directory structures are present on both sides and synchronise them if and when needed. On This means, for example, that zids will have 2 HOMES, one on each Storage Host, zids will have:. All the following storage locations can be referenced by the corresponding environment variables, which will be defined automatically for each session or job.
File System | Suitable for ... | Technology | Features | Quota |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HOME | permanent files, e. g. profile, utilities, sources, libraries, etc. | Lustre (on ws1 and ws2) |
| 100GB |
| TCWORK | permanent large files. Main storage for your jobs and experiments input and output files. | Lustre (on ws1 and ws2) |
| 50 TB |
SCRATCHDIR | Big temporary data for an individual session or job, not as fast as TMPDIR but higher capacity. Files accessible from all cluster. | Lustre (on ws1 and ws2) | Deleted at the end of session or job Created per session/ job | part of TCWORK quota |
TMPDIR | Fast temporary data for an individual session or job, small files only. Local to every node. | SSD on shared nodes (*f QoSs) | Deleted at the end of session or job Created per session/ job | 3 GB per session/job by default. Customisable up to 40 GB with
|
RAM on exclusive compute nodes (*p QoSs) | no limit (maximum memory of the node) |
...
| Note |
|---|
Note that there is no PERM or SCRATCH, and the corresponding environment variables will not be defined. |
| Info |
|---|
HOME, TCWORK and SCRATCHDIR are all based on the Lustre Parallel filesystem for maximum reliability. Those will not be accessible from outside the HPCF, including VDI instances or VMs running the ecFlow servers |
...