Quotas

Triton has quotas which limit both the space usage and number of files. The quota for your home directory ($HOME) is 20GB, for $WRKDIR by default is 200GB, and project directories depending on request (as of 2021). These quotas exist to avoid usage exploding without anyone noticing. If you ever need more space, just ask. We’ll either give you more or find a solution for you.

There is a inode (number of files) quota of 1 million, because scratch is not that great for too many small files. If you have too many small files, see the page on small files.

Quick reference

  • Read about data storage at Aalto and requesting storage space. We strongly recommend project-based storage instead of increasing personal quotas.

  • quota - print your quota and usage

  • Finding what is using space

    • The dust tool prints a nice tree of largest directories. module load dust then dust $HOME on Triton. $HOME can be replaced with any other directory (or left off for current directory)

    • du -h $HOME/ | sort -h: Like above but works everywhere. Use du -ah to list all files.

      • du -h --max-depth=1 $HOME/ | sort -h: Similar, but only list down to --max-depth levels.

      • du --inodes --max-depth=1 $HOME/ | sort -n: Similar, but list the number of files in the directories.

  • rm removes a single file, rm -r removes a whole directory tree. Warning: on scratch and Linux in general (unless backed up), there is no recovery from this!! Think twice before you push enter. If you have any questions, come to a garage and get help.

  • conda clean cleans up downloaded conda files (but not environments).

Lustre (scratch/work) quotas

Note

Before 2021-09-15, quotas worked differently, and used group IDs rather than project IDs. There were many things that could go wrong and give you “disk quota exceeded” even though there appeared to be enough space.

There are both quotas for users and projects (/m/$dept/scratch/$project). We use project IDs for this (see detailed link in See Also), and our convention is that project IDs are the same as numeric group IDs. The quota command shows the correct quotas (by project) by default, so there is nothing special you should need to do.

If you want to look deeper, check the project ID with lfs project -d {path} and quotas with lfs quota -hp {project_id}.

Unlike the previous situation, there should be much fewer possible quota problems.

Home directory quotas

Home directories have a quota, and unlike scratch, space for home is much more limited. We generally don’t increase home directory quotas, but we can help you move stuff to scratch for the cases that fill up your home directories (e.g. installing Python or R packages which go to home by default)

Project/archive (“Aalto Teamwork”)

The project/scratch directories use a completely different system from scratch (though quotas work similarly), even if they are visible on Triton. Quotas for these are managed through your departments or IT Services.

See also