Retirement of Old Scratch Hardware

As announced last month, MSI will be retiring its old disk storage hardware that was serving as the global scratch space on Wednesday, August 4. For the last 3+ weeks, this file system has been reachable at /scratch.old in a Read-Only state. You may still access these files before August 4, so you have a small amount of time to copy those files elsewhere if needed.

Also, please check your SLURM job scripts (or any other scripts you’ve written) for explicit references to the old scratch file system. They will look similar to this:

/panfs/roc/ (...some directory in your scratch area…)

These types of direct references to the old scratch volumes in your scripts will no longer work and will give errors starting on August 4. 

Reminder: The new shared scratch storage area is found at /scratch.global and as with the retired scratch file system, the files there are not backed up and will be deleted 30 days after they are created. 

If you have need to use scratch data files during your batch jobs that are sized less than 1 Terabyte, and which you do not need after your job run, we encourage you to use the *local* scratch storage available on every node. Local scratch (/scratch.local) is not shared among nodes, so will be unavailable to you once your job completes. You will need to copy/move any desired output from local scratch to your home directory (or other storage you have access to) in your SLURM job script.

Details of scratch storage options.