Perlmutter Scratch¶

Permutter Scratch is an all-flash Lustre file system designed for high performance temporary storage of large files. It is intended to support intensive I/O for jobs that are being actively computed on the Perlmutter system. We recommend that you run your jobs, especially data intensive ones, from the Perlmutter Scratch File System.

Usage¶

The Perlmutter Scratch File system should always be referenced using the environment variable $PSCRATCH. This variable expands to /pscratch/sd/FirstLetterOfUserName/YourUserName. For example, for user, elvis, $PSCRATCH would become /pscratch/sd/e/elvis. Perlmutter scratch is available to all Permutter compute nodes and is tuned for high performance.

Quotas¶

If your scratch usage exceeds your quota, you will not be able to write to the file system until you reduce your usage.

Performance¶

The Perlmutter Scratch File System is an all-flash file system. It has 35 PB of disk space, an aggregate bandwidth of >5 TB/sec, and 4 million IOPS (4 KiB random). It has 16 MDS (metadata servers), 274 I/O servers called OSSs, and 3,792 dual-ported NVMe SSDs.

Default File Striping¶

By default files on Perlmutter are striped across a single OST. Given the large number of small files on our system, this is a compromise to ensure reasonable performance for most files. However, some I/O patterns may find better performance with different striping. Please see our Lustre striping page for a longer discussion.

Backup¶

All NERSC users should backup important files on a regular basis. Ultimately, it is the user's responsibility to prevent data loss.

Lifetime¶

Perlmutter scratch directories are purged. Perlmutter scratch directories may be deleted after a user is no longer active.