Disk quota exceeded

This warning means that you have exceeded your disk space quota or have too many files on the disk area. To see which quota is used up, type:

csc-workspaces

An example output is shown below:

Personal home folder        Quota
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
/users/jdoe                 Capacity:     653M/10G   Files:    .68k/100k

Project applications        Quota
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
/projappl/project_2000040   Capacity:   283.5M/50G   Files:    .37k/100k

Project scratch             Quota
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
/scratch/project_2000040    Capacity:   1.098T*/1T   Files:   .02k/1000k

The asterisk (*) indicates which quota is exceeded. To be able to create new files in this disk area you need to delete or move files elsewhere, e.g. to Allas. If moving/deleting data is infeasible, you can apply for more quota.

Conda

A common reason for exceeding your $HOME or /projappl disk quota is the usage of Conda-based installations. Conda environments result in the creation of excessive numbers of files which cause extra load on the Lustre parallel file system used in the HPC environment. This manifests as prolonged startup times and disk slowness affecting all users.

If you need to use Conda on CSC supercomputers, we require that you containerize your environment, see usage policy. To easily containerize your Conda environments, please see the Tykky container wrapper tool.

If you are new to containers, you can consult the following relevant sections of tutorials which are collected as part of previous CSC courses:

• Using CSC HPC Environment Efficiently course
• Containers and Workflows in Bioinformatics course

I have deleted many files, but still get disk quota exceeded warning?

It is common for some software to create hidden directories starting with a dot (.), such as .cache, .cargo or .local. These are often created by default in your personal home folder and may cause confusion if they make you exceed your disk quota. As hidden files are not shown by regular ls command, it may seem like moving/deleting most folders/files does not have any effect.

To also see all hidden files/directories in a given folder, you need to use ls -a option. LUE (Lustre Usage Explorer) is another recommended tool for finding where you have a lot of data that by default also checks for hidden files and directories. Please use it if you exceed your disk quota and have a hard time figuring out where the files might be hiding. For example:

module load lue
lue $HOME

See also this LUE tutorial.

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Last update: March 15, 2024

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