Climate and Weather Platform¶

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

Getting Started¶

Policies

New users are invited to read carefully the CSCS User Policies.

Getting access¶

Principal Investigators (PIs) and Deputy PIs can invite users to join their projects using the project management tool.

Once invited to a project you will receive an email with information on how to create an account and configure multi-factor authentication (MFA).

Systems¶

Santis

Santis is a large Grace-Hopper cluster for GPU-enabled climate and weather workloads.

File systems and storage¶

There are three main file systems mounted on the CWP clusters.

type	mount	file system
Home	/users/$USER	Vadret
Scratch	`/capstor/scratch/cscs/$USER`	Capstor
Store	`/capstor/store/cscs/userlab/<project>`	Capstor

Home¶

Every user has a home path ($HOME) mounted at /users/$USER on the Vadret file system. Home directories have 50 GB of capacity and are intended for keeping configuration files, small software packages, and scripts.

Scratch¶

The Scratch file system is a large, temporary storage system designed for high-performance I/O. It is not backed up.

See the Scratch documentation for more information.

The environment variable $SCRATCH points to /capstor/scratch/cscs/$USER, and can be used as a shortcut to access your scratch folder.

scratch cleanup policy

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

Scratch is not intended for permanent storage: transfer files back to the Store after batch job completion.

Store¶

The Store (or Project) file system is provided as a space to store datasets, code, or configuration scripts that can be accessed from different clusters. The file system is backed up and there is no automated deletion policy.

The environment variable $PROJECT can be used as a shortcut to access the Store folder of your primary project.

Hard limits on the amount of data and number of files (inodes) will prevent you from writing to Store if your quotas are exceeded.

Warning

It is not recommended to write directly to the $PROJECT path from batch jobs.

Checking quota¶

You can check how much capacity and how many files (inodes) you are consuming, and the corresponding quotas, by running the quota command on a login node.

The quota command prints a table with one row per file system path that you have access to. The most important columns are:

Directory: the file system path (for example your $HOME, $SCRATCH, and each $PROJECT Store path you are a member of).
Used: the amount currently used (capacity or number of files).
%: the percentage of the quota used.
Grace: the remaining grace period once a soft quota has been exceeded.
Limit: the quota limit (capacity or maximum number of files).

The same set of columns is reported twice for each path: once for the capacity quota and once for the files (inode) quota.

path names in the quota output

The paths shown by quota are taken from the internal storage service, not from the vCluster where the command is executed. This means the directory names may differ from the mount points you see on Santis. For example, $HOME is reported as /vast/users/cscs/$USER instead of /users/$USER.

See the quota documentation for a detailed example and a description of the different quota types.