⚠️ Only Wynton Regular (P1-P2) accounts can use the cluster as of 2026-01-30. Protected (P3 and P4) data and accounts have been decommissioned.
/wynton/ #
The /wynton/ storage is on a ZFS file system on top of our BeeGFS
parallel storage system. This is automatically compressed (using
lz4 compression in ZFS) before anything is written to the physical
drives. Because of this, a 1.0 MiB file is likely to occupy less than
1.0 MiB of drive space. Exactly, how much a file is compressed varies
greatly with file format but as a rule of thumb plain text files can
be compressed more than files in a binary format. Already compressed
files such as GZ or ZIP files are unlikely to be compressed further.
Because of this underlying disk compression, command-line tools such
as ls and du may not report what you expect it to report. For
example, consider an Apptainer image file rocker_r-base.sif of size
274,538,527 bytes (= 274,538,527/1024^2 = 261.8 MiB);
[alice@dev2 ~]$ ls -l rocker_r-base.sif
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 alice boblab 274538527 May 8 2018 rocker_r-base.sif
The actual space consumed on disk by this file is 256,136,704 bytes (93.3%):
[alice@dev2 ~]$ ls -s --block-size 1 rocker_r-base.sif
256136704 rocker_r-base.sif
Using the disk-usage tool du, we can see the same if we do:
[alice@dev2 ~]$ du --apparent-size --block-size=1 rocker_r-base.sif
274538527 rocker_r-base.sif
and
[alice@dev2 ~]$ du --block-size=1 rocker_r-base.sif
256136704 rocker_r-base.sif
Comment: It is the compressed size that counts towards your disk quota.
The BeeGFS file system keeps track of how much disk each of us currently consumes in different storage locations, specifically:
User home folder ($HOME, i.e. /wynton/home/)
Group folder under (i.e. /wynton/group/)
User files and folders under /wynton/scratch/ (unlimited quota)
These different type of locations are formally referred to as storage pools by BeeGFS.
If we ever run out of quota in one storage pool, BeeGFS detects this
and prevents us from writing additional data. The symptoms of a full
quota may vary. You might get a clear “disk full” error, or you might
experience obscure issues such as having problems logging in. You can
use the BeeGFS tool beegfs-ctl --getquota ... to check how much disk
quota you have and how much you currently consume. Below sections
give instructions how to check this for the different storage
locations available.
Please, be patient! If you remove files to clean up your quota, it
might take up to ten minutes before these changes are seen with
beegfs-ctl --getquota .... This is because BeeGFS updates the quota
information only once every ten minutes.
/wynton/home/ #
To check how much storage space you have consumed on /wynton/home/,
and the total amount available to you, call:
beegfs-ctl --getquota --storagepoolid=11 --uid "$USER"
For example,
[alice@dev2 ~]$ beegfs-ctl --getquota --storagepoolid=11 --uid "$USER"
user/group || size || chunk files
name | id || used | hard || used | hard
--------------|------||------------|------------||---------|---------
alice| 99002|| 88.71 GiB| 1000.00 GiB|| 645266|unlimited
tells us that user alice has 645,266 files that occupy 88.71 GiB
(‘size used’) on the BeeGFS file system out of their 1000.00 GiB
(‘size hard’). Importantly, because the /wynton/home/ storage
is mirrored, the disk usage (‘size used’) and the available quota
(‘size hard’) are reported at twice the size of what you would
expect for a non-mirrored storage. This is why your 500-GiB home
storage space is reported as 1000 GiB by the
beegfs-ctl tool.
/wynton/group/ #
If your group/lab (e.g. boblab) has purchased additional
storage, it is available under
/wynton/group/. To check how much storage space your group/lab has
consumed of the total amount available to it, call:
beegfs-ctl --getquota --storagepoolid=12 --gid "$(id --group)"
For example,
[alice@dev2 ~]$ beegfs-ctl --getquota --storagepoolid=12 --gid "$(id --group)"
user/group || size || chunk files
name | id || used | hard || used | hard
--------------|------||------------|------------||---------|---------
boblab| 34001|| 13.43 TiB| 40.00 TiB|| 0|unlimited
says that the boblab group is using 13.43 TiB out of the 40.00 TiB
group storage they have acquired. If the hard limit is 1 Byte
(sic!), that is a placeholder that the group has not purchased
any group storage.
The group storage is shared among all group members and does not
count toward your personal disk quota under $HOME.
Any group with purchased storage can have a group folder in the /wynton/group/ area. In that case, the group quota usage
would include group-owned files in both areas.
It could be that you are part of another lab or institute that have
purchased their own storage. This is common for users affiliated with
Gladstone Institutes. For example, above, user alice is part of the
boblab group;
[alice@dev2 ~]$ id --group
boblab
but they are also part of the carol_inst group;
[alice@dev2 ~]$ id --groups
boblab carol_inst
To see the disk quota for all groups, we can call:
for group in $(id --groups); do beegfs-ctl --getquota --storagepoolid=12 --gid "$group"; done
For example,
[alice@dev2 ~]$ for group in $(id --groups); do beegfs-ctl --getquota --storagepoolid=12 --gid "$group"; done
user/group || size || chunk files
name | id || used | hard || used | hard
--------------|------||------------|------------||---------|---------
boblab| 34001|| 13.43 TiB| 40.00 TiB|| 0|unlimited
user/group || size || chunk files
name | id || used | hard || used | hard
--------------|------||------------|------------||---------|---------
carol_inst| 35000|| 75.16 TiB| 100.00 TiB|| 14957560|unlimited
which shows that alice has access to 40 TiB via the boblab group
and another 100 TiB via the carol_inst group.
/wynton/scratch/ #
To check your disk consumption on the global scratch space
(/wynton/scratch/), use:
beegfs-ctl --getquota --storagepoolid=10 --uid "$USER"
Comment: There are no user or group quotas on /wynton/scratch/,
but files on the global scratch that are older than two weeks are
deleted automatically.