Access to storage resources is obtained through investments in Research Computing (made either as hardware investments or service investments). Investments are made in fixed units appropriate to the given resources. When a request to make an investment is made by submitting the online purchase request form, we try to provision the resources within two business days. For HiPerGator, there are currently two storage investment units:
- Orange Storage Units (OSUs) correspond to investment units within the orange storage type. This storage type is less expensive, offering lower relative performance than blue storage. The performance is still higher than the typical NAS appliance purchased from the consumer market, and is designed for long-term use in enterprise and research computing environments. This storage is ideal for keeping numerous or large files for long periods of time, with regular access for reading and writing.
- Blue Storage Units (BSUs) correspond to investment units within the blue storage type. This storage type is more expensive, offering high performance for large groups of independent tasks running on HiPerGator to read and write simultaneously, including coordinated tasks running MPI programs. Large files that are accessed for reading and writing in a random way by one or many tasks should also be stored on the blue storage type.
More information regarding UFRC storage types is available on the Storage Types policy page. Details regarding the implementation and use of UFRC storage can be found on the Storage Use policy page.
A small home directory (40GB quota) is also provided for HiPerGator users, which is not intended for high performance work. Your /home area is intended for source code, scripts, and other human-readable data; the amount of data stored in your /home area should be kept to a minimum. Home directories also have one week of daily snapshots available, which can be accessed by the user to recover older versions of files or accidentally deleted files. View the video on restoring files in /home from snapshots for detailed instructions on this process.
NFS-based storage on HiPerGator systems is typically auto-mounted, meaning it is dynamically mounted only when users are actually accessing them. For example, if you have an invested folder named /orange/smith, you must to specifically type in the full path of “/orange/smith” to be able to see the contents and access them. Directly browsing /orange will not show the smith sub-folder (unless someone else is using it coincidentally). Auto-mounted folders are common on HiPerGator systems, they include /orange, /bio, /rlts and even /home.