On 06/12/2018 04:06 AM, John Hearns via Beowulf wrote:
In the topic on avoiding fragmentation Chris Samuel wrote:

 >Our trick in Slurm is to use the slurmdprolog script to set an XFS project
 >quota for that job ID on the per-job directory (created by a plugin which
 >also makes subdirectories there that it maps to /tmp and /var/tmp for the
 >job) on the XFS partition used for local scratch on the node.

I had never thought of that, and it is a very neat thing to do.
What I would like to discuss is the more general topic of clearing files from 'fast' storage. Many sites I have seen have dedicated fast/parallel storage which is referred to as scratch space. The intention is to use this scratch space for the duration of a project, as it is expensive. However I have often seen that the scratch space i used as permanent storage, contrary to the intentions of whoever sized it, paid for it and installed it.

I feel that the simplistic 'run a cron job and delete files older than N days' is outdated.

My personal take is that heirarchical storage is the answere, automatically pushing files to slower and cheaper tiers.

Disclaimer: I work for one such parallel and fast (and often used for scratch) company called Panasas.

I disagree with the notion that hierarchical storage is a silver bullet in many HPC-oriented cases. In fact, I would argue in some environments it poses serious risks to being able to keep a lid on your storage cost and DC footprint, whether that's for scratch, home, or archive storage. People (including myself in my own systems testing) can generate an enormous amount of data that has near-zero value past the project currently being worked on, which may only be measured in weeks or low numbers of months. In many of my cases it's cheaper to regenerate those many TBs of data then to hold onto it for a year or more. Auto-tiering scratch data to cheaper storage as it gets colder seems like an easy answer as it takes some of this responsibility away from the users, but you'll still want to /someday/ ditch that data entirely (for scratch-like data that is). Culling through piles of likely mechanically named files you haven't looked at in a long time is difficult as a human exercise, and without sufficiently complex media asset management it's also difficult from a storage perspective as your data may take a /long/ time to even list, much less grep through, when pulling from true archive storage.

For true scratch I think the solution presented by many of the posters relating to automatic deletion policies managed by administrators, which develops and forces good data habits, is ultimately the cleanest solution in the long-term.

Now, tiering within a storage layer based on different types or access frequencies of data is perfectly reasonable and is something we do in our systems. Also, using external software to automatically tier cold but persistent data (i.e., home dir data) from fast to archive storage is also reasonable. But there are a lot of pitfalls from trying to automatically tier data that isn't supposed to be (eternally) persistent IMHO.

Best,

ellis

--
Ellis H. Wilson III, Ph.D.
     www.ellisv3.com
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