Compute and storage quota

Questions

  • What is quota and why is it needed?

  • How do I get quota?

  • For how long can I use the quota?

  • How is quota being consumed?

  • What can I do when my quota is consumed?

  • How to apply for additional quota?

Objectives

  • Understand what quota is

  • Be aware about how quota is consumed

  • Know what issues may arise from exceeding the allocated quota

  • Be able to resolve issues revolving from exceeding quotas

  • Be able to use quota effictively by planning ahead

Instructor note

  • Teaching: 20 min

  • Discussion: 10 min

How to demonstrate dusage:

  • Instructor shows dusage directly on the cluster. The reason is that the output is colored and we can then also try to troubleshoot problems together.

  • Show dusage on several clusters as some clusters have soft limits and hard limits.

Demonstrating going beyond quota:

  • The instructor prepares a situation by creating a big file before the course which exceeds quota so that we can see how error messages look and also together discuss how to solve the problem. This can be done for instance using head -c 1GB /dev/urandom > large-file.bin

  • On Saga and Fram it can be interesting to demonstrate that moving the files may not be enough. This can be demonstrated with moving, followed by a comparison of du vs. dusage mismatch if group permissions have not been adjusted.

Demo/discussion time

We have great documentation about compute and storage quota and there is no point repeating it here. Let’s go through the documentation and examples together: