Using the global temporary filesystem

Introduction

The home directory is often insufficient for running batch jobs. The global temporary filesystem, known as santmp, provides a cheap (free) resource for storing files that may be required over multiple batch jobs. The default santmp quota is 40GB.

Location

The directory will already exist for you and is located on the SAN in /santmp/<username>. $SANTMP can also be used as a synonym for your santmp directory.

Policies

• There is no back up policy on /santmp.
• There is a purge policy, files may last longer than a week though you should not expect them to last any longer than a week.
• There is a quota on /santmp and it is fixed per user.

Usage

Santmp is a great location to stage batch jobs from, it has a large capacity with high performance and will last between batch jobs. This should be thought of much like /tmp but has the benefit of being visible to all machines.

Files can be purged from here so it is useful to keep copies of important files in either the home directories or stored offline on tape.