Quota Management

This page describes how to manage your disk quota on our Archival and parallel filesystems.

Determine quota usage on the HPC parallel filesystem (GPFS)#

To show how much of your quota you are using in your HPC home directory, login and run the following command:

$ gpfs_quota --home

Showing quota information for home dirctory: USERNAME
                         Block Limits                                    |     File Limits
Filesystem type         blocks      quota      limit   in_doubt    grace |    files   quota    limit in_doubt    grace  Remarks
home       USR          73.44G       150G       150G         1M     none |    10515       0        0        0     none DSS01.local

The blocks column represents usage, and the quota column represents the total size of your quota.

To show how much of your quota your group is using in your purchased research allocation volume, login and run the following command:

1 2	`# Syntax $ gpfs_quota VOLUME_NAME`

For example, consider a group named researchlab:

$ gpfs_quota researchlab

Showing quota information for research fileset: [filset_name]
                         Block Limits                                    |     File Limits
Filesystem type         blocks      quota      limit   in_doubt    grace |    files   quota    limit in_doubt    grace  Remarks
research   FILESET      3.902T     5.859T     5.859T     6.237G     none |  3139994       0        0    17734     none DSS01.local

Note

If you need more details or a different output format (such as bytes), you can use the mmlsquota command (refer to official documentation for more info on this command)

Determine storage usage on Archival#

Currently, we are working on a solution for users to view storage usage on our Archival system. In the meantime, you can submit a support request, and we will provide this information.

Which directories or users are using the most storage space?#

Within any directory on any filesystem, you can calculate the distribution of storage space used by using the du command. Warning: This command can take a very long time to run, since it must read the file attributes for every single file in a given directory tree. It is recommended you run this command as a compute job.

1	`$ du -ch --max-depth=1 /PATH/TO/ANALYZE`

Quota Alerts (GPFS)#

Email alerts can be sent for directories under /gpfs/research. To set up a quota alert email you will configure a crontab entry. You can change or remove this at any time. For example, let's say the name of your directory is superduper.

First, SSH to one of the login servers. For example h22-login-24.rcc.fsu.edu . The quota alert script is /usr/local/bin/quota_alert.pl . Let's run that with some arguments to test it out:

[myuser@h22-login-24 ~]$ quota_alert.pl superduper 92.5 myuser@fsu.edu
superduper is using 64.02 TB out of 69.00 TB
That is 92.78% usage.
Alert threshold is 92.50%
Alert threshold met or exceeded.  Sending email to: myuser@fsu.edu
Running /usr/bin/mailx -S sendwait -s "superduper Alert Threshold Exceeded" myuser@fsu.edu < /tmp/quota_email.2859241
Removing /tmp/quota_email.2859241

Let's run it with a higher threshold:

[myuser@h22-login-24 ~]$ quota_alert.pl superduper 95 myuser@fsu.edu
superduper is using 64.02 TB out of 69.00 TB
That is 92.78% usage.
Alert threshold is 95.00%
Alert threshold not met.
Removing /tmp/quota_email.2859397

Running these command are a good way to test the script and to figure out what threshold you want to use. Substitute your directory name and your email address. You can use more than one email address. Make sure to separate them with commas and no spaces.

The next step is to put this command into cron using the crontab command. Tutorials on crontab for Linux can be found online. This will just be a brief example workflow.

List your crontab to make sure it does not have existing entries:

1 2	`[myuser@h22-login-24 ~]$ crontab -l [myuser@h22-login-24 ~]$`

Use your favorite text editor to make a file with a single line similar to the one below. Make sure to substitute your directory, alert threshold, and email address.

1	`18 10 * * * /usr/local/bin/quota_alert.pl superduper 65.5 myuser@fsu.edu > /dev/null`

This sets the program to run at 10:18 every day. Use your own hour and minute that you choose.

Let's load that file into cron:

1	`[myuser@h22-login-24 ~]$ crontab mynewcrontab.txt`

Now run the crontab list command to verify:

1 2	`[myuser@h22-login-24 ~]$ crontab -l 18 10 * * * /usr/local/bin/quota_alert.pl superduper 65.5 myuser@fsu.edu > /dev/null`

You will now receive email alerts any time your alert threshold is met or exceeded. This will happen once per day at the time you specified. You can edit this crontab entry at any time to change or remove it. You have full control of the quota alerts.