Managing Files

The clusters mounts three file systems: the home, work, and scratch file systems. They automatically define three corresponding account-level environment variables called $HOME, $SCRATCH, and $WORK that store the paths to directories that you own on each of these file systems.

The home and scratch file systems are shared only on local cluster,  but the work file system is the Global Shared File System hosted on Stockyard (https://www.tacc.utexas.edu/systems/stockyard). It is the same work file system that is available on Stampede2, Maverick, Wrangler, Lonestar5, and several other TACC resources.

The $STOCKYARD environment variable points to the highest-level directory that you own on the Global Shared File System. The definition of the $STOCKYARD environment variable is of course account-specific, but you will see the same value on all TACC systems that provide access to the Global Shared File System.  This directory is an excellent place to store files you want to access regularly from multiple TACC resources.

Your account-specific $WORK environment variable varies from system to system and is a sub-directory of $STOCKYARD. The sub-directory name corresponds to the associated TACC resource. The $WORK environment variable on Stampede2 points to the $STOCKYARD/stampede2 subdirectory, a convenient location for files you use and jobs you run on Stampede2. Remember, however, that all subdirectories contained in your $STOCKYARD directory are available to you from any system that mounts the file system. If you have accounts on both Stampede2 and Maverick, for example, the $STOCKYARD/stampede2 directory is available from your Maverick account, and $STOCKYARD/maverick is available from your Stampede2 account. Your quota and reported usage on the Global Shared File System reflects all files that you own on Stockyard, regardless of their actual location on the file system.

Note that resource-specific sub-directories of $STOCKYARD are nothing more than convenient ways to manage your resource-specific files. You have access to any such sub-directory from any TACC resources. If you are logged into Stampede2, for example, executing the alias cdw (equivalent to "cd $WORK") will take you to the resource-specific sub-directory $STOCKYARD/stampede2. But you can access this directory from other TACC systems as well by executing "cd $STOCKYARD/stampede2". These commands allow you to share files across TACC systems. In fact, several convenient account-level aliases make it even easier to navigate across the directories you own in the shared file systems:

Transferring Files

You can transfer files between TACC Resources and/or your local machine using the SCP program.  SCP is available in the Linux,  Mac and Windows 10 terminal.  Other Windows ssh clients typically include some form of scp-based file transfer capabilities.