Project layout
This is not a complete article: This is a draft, a work in progress that is intended to be published into an article, which may or may not be ready for inclusion in the main wiki. It should not necessarily be considered factual or authoritative.
The project filesystem on Cedar and Graham is organized on the basis of groups though with an easy user-based interface. The normal method to access the project space is by means of symbolic links which exist in your home directory. This will have the form $HOME/projects/group_name along with another symbolic link $HOME/project that points to the project directory for your default group (for those users who belong to more than one group).
The permissions on the group space are such that it is owned by the principal investigator (PI) for this group members have read and write permission on this directory. However by default a newly created file will only be readable by group members. If the group wishes to have writeable files, the best approach is to create a special directory for that, for example
[name@server ~]$ mkdir $HOME/project/group_writable
followed by
[name@server ~]$ setfacl -d -m g::rwx $HOME/project/group_writable
For more on sharing data, file ownership, and access control lists (ACLs), see Sharing data.
The project space is subject to a default quota of 1 TB and five million files per group and which can be increased up to 10 TB of space upon request to Compute Canada support. Certain groups may have been awarded significantly higher quotas through the annual resource allocation competition. In this case, you will already have been notified of your group's quota for the coming year. Note that this storage allocation is specific to a particular cluster and cannot normally be transferred to another cluster.
Special notes:
July 20, 2017: we have reorganized the temporary directory structure under /project (one directory for each user) to a project-based directory structure to enable file sharing within research groups. Within your home directory you find a link ~/project that points to your default project directory (i.e., cd ~/project will change to that directory). In your home directory you also find a directory ~/projects that contains links to all project directories of which you are a member. The group ownership of all project directories has been set to that of the project. You may have to change the group permission, if you do not want your files in the project directory to be readable by the group. If you already had a project directory /project/<username>, that directory has been moved into your default project directory, i.e., you can access it as ~/project/$USER. For backward compatibility we also installed a link from the previous location to the new location (so that running jobs will not fail). Do not continue to use the old location - those links will get removed within a few weeks.
Please note that there are still some pending configuration changes and updates to this system. Downtime may be required with relatively little notice during upcoming days.