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Climate and weather platform

The Climate and Weather Platform (CWP) provides compute, storage and support to the climate and weather modeling community in Switzerland.

Getting Started

Getting access

Project administrators (PIs and deputy PIs) of projects on the CWP can to invite users to join their project, before they can use the project's resources on Alps.

Todo

This points to the Waldur solution - whether the UMP or Waldur docs are linked depends on which is being used when these docs go live.

This is performed using the project management tool

Once invited to a project, you will receive an email, which you can need to create an account and configure multi-factor authentification (MFA).

Systems

Santis is the system deployed on the Alps infrastructure for the climate and weather platform. Its name derives from the highest mountain Säntis in the Alpstein massif of North-Eastern Switzerland.

File systems and storage

There are three main file systems mounted on the CWP system Santis.

type mount filesystem
Home /users/$USER VAST
Scratch /capstor/scratch/cscs/$USER Capstor
Project /capstor/store/cscs/userlab/<project> Capstor

Home

Every user has a home path ($HOME) mounted at /users/$USER on the VAST filesystem. The home directory has 50 GB of capacity, and is intended for configuration, small software packages and scripts.

Scratch

The Scratch filesystem provides temporary storage for high-performance I/O for executing jobs. Use scratch to store datasets that will be accessed by jobs, and for job output. Scratch is per user - each user gets separate scratch path and quota.

Info

A quota of 150 TB and 1 million inodes (files and folders) is applied to your scratch path.

These are implemented as soft quotas: upon reaching either limit there is a grace period of 1 week before write access to $SCRATCH is blocked.

You can check your quota at any time from Ela or one of the login nodes, using the quota command.

Info

The environment variable SCRATCH=/capstor/scratch/cscs/$USER is set automatically when you log into the system, and can be used as a shortcut to access scratch.

scratch cleanup policy

Files that have not been accessed in 30 days are automatically deleted.

Scratch is not intended for permanant storage: transfer files back to the capstor project storage after job runs.

Project

Project storage is backed up, with no cleaning policy: it provides intermediate storage space for datasets, shared code or configuration scripts that need to be accessed from different vClusters. Project is per project - each project gets a project folder with project-specific quota.

  • hard limits on capacity and inodes prevent users from writing to project if the quota is reached - you can check quota and available space by running the quota command on a login node or ela.
  • it is not recommended to write directly to the project path from jobs.