Translations:Niagara Quickstart/225/en

It is important to understand the file systems, so as to perform your file I/O (Input/Output) responsibly. Refer to the Data management at Niagara page for details about the file systems.

• Your files can be seen on all Niagara login and compute nodes.
• $HOME, $SCRATCH, and $PROJECT all use the parallel file system called GPFS.
• GPFS is a high-performance file system which provides rapid reads and writes to large data sets in parallel from many nodes.
• Accessing data sets which consist of many, small files leads to poor performance on GPFS.
• Avoid reading and writing lots of small amounts of data to disk. Many small files on the system waste space and are slower to access, read and write. If you must write many small files, use ramdisk.
• Write data out in a binary format. This is faster and takes less space.
• The Burst Buffer is better for i/o heavy jobs and to speed up checkpoints.