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Storage

Network File Systems

The following mount points are available and shared among all nodes.

Summary

Available NFS mount points:

Path Hosted by Disk Capacity Mount mode Comments
/mnt/nfs/ front.dalek Samsung SSD 990 PRO 4 TB RW Contains user homedirs (/mnt/nfs/users) and software (/mnt/nfs/software ). Backup every day on front.dalek in /mnt/bkp/nfs.
/mnt/raid1/meteors nas.dalek 2x Seagate Barracuda (RAID1) 16 TB RO Required to be in the meteor group.
/mnt/raid1/workspace nas.dalek 2x Seagate Barracuda (RAID1) 16 TB RW Required to be in the meteor group.
/mnt/data/ nas.dalek Samsung SSD 990 PRO 4 TB RW Contain AI models (/mnt/data/ai-models).

Frontend

The frontend node (front.dalek) provides an NFS mount point at /mnt/nfs/, hosted on a Samsung SSD 990 PRO 4 TB disk. The main directories are:

  • /mnt/nfs/users: user home directories
  • /mnt/nfs/software: installed software (primarily managed via Environment Modules)
  • /mnt/nfs/install: configuration files for automatic node installation

This SSD is backed up every night to another Samsung SSD 990 PRO 4 TB. Backups are stored on the frontend node and accessible at /mnt/bkp/nfs (but only from front.dalek). Users can browse and restore files from the latest backup (typically from the previous day).

NAS

The NAS node (nas.dalek) also provides several NFS mount points. The first resides on two 16 TB HDDs configured in RAID 1, exposing:

  • /mnt/raid1/meteors: a read-only directory containing meteor video sequences (accessible only to users in the meteor group)
  • /mnt/raid1/workspace: a read-write directory for working with meteor datasets (also restricted to the meteor group)

Additionally, nas.dalek hosts a Samsung SSD 990 PRO 4 TB disk mounted at /mnt/data/ and available via NFS. For now it mainly contains AI models:

  • /mnt/data/ai-models: readable by all users, but write access is restricted to members of the ai-models group.

Local

Each node is equipped with a SSD drive. Depending on the partition here are the specifications:

Partition SSD Size
az4-n4090 Samsung SSD 990 PRO 4 TB
az4-a7900 Samsung SSD 990 PRO 2 TB
iml-ia770 Kingston SSD OM8PGP41024Q-A0 1 TB
az5-a890m Crucial SSD P3 Plus CT1000P3PSSD8 1 TB

An ext4 partition of 250 GB is reserved for the operating system and is not available to users.

Scratch

The remaining disk space is allocated to a "scratch" partition mounted at /scratch (ext4 filesystem). Each time a user connects to a node, a /scratch/$USER directory is automatically created if it does not already exist. Unlike a typical scratch filesystem, on Dalek these directories persist on the node; however, they are not backed up. Therefore, users should avoid storing sensitive data there.